2000s List Discussion and Suggestions (Lists Project Vol. 3)

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jindianajonz · #126 Post by **jindianajonz** » Sat Oct 03, 2015 7:57 pm

Is there a better release of Werckmeister Harmonies than Artificial Eyes, or is that the best route to go?

#127 Post by **swo17** » Sat Oct 03, 2015 10:14 pm

I'm not aware of a better release. Make sure you have the second, corrected edition.

Tommaso · #128 Post by **Tommaso** » Sun Oct 11, 2015 7:19 am

My first spotlight title:

Shirin (Abbas Kiarostami, 2008): I approached this with a little bit of doubt: can a 90 min. film which consists entirely of the faces of women in a cinema watching a film which is never shown to us - we hear the soundtrack, though - function at all? Sure, something similar may have been done by Bergman in "The Magic Flute", but there it was only for the eight minutes or so of the opera's overture. But could this really be more than just an exercise in style which would be as hard to sit through as the more minimalist moments in Dreyer's "Gertrud"?

Well, given the director, I should have known better. Shirin turned out to be one of the most exciting cinematic experiences I've had in a long time. It's completely amazing how we can imagine the unseen film just by the soundtrack and the reactions of the women to what they -supposedly - see. We learn from the making-of that is included on the BFI disc that the actresses also didn't see anything on screen, but that the director very carefully scripted their reactions and emotions. And the women and their facial expressions, in their diversity - and thanks to the brilliant lighting and framing that Kiarostami gives his actresses - become uncannily engaging, and it seems that Kiarostami invites us to closely study their individuality and personalities. On another level, we're also invited to make a connection between the unseen film - a 12th century doomed love story - and the realities of those women's lives. Indirectly, this may of course be seen as a comment on the social position of women in his home country, but I think that the film is much more generally concerned with discovering what is special in every person. In spite of its formal severity, Shirin is a deeply involving and emotional film; a complete masterpiece, if you ask me.

And also highly recommended:

The Wayward Cloud (Tsai Ming-Liang, 2005): The more I see from Tsai, the more I am impressed. This metaphoric tale about the impossibility of love may be less immediately touching than What time is it there?, but it's no less complex or rewarding. Much of the film, especially the ending, may be disturbing, but the sex scenes never feel gratuitous and are often done with a sense of humour, too (again, apart from the final one). I loved how the film contrasts the grim realities of the porn business with the inner states of the protagonists by showing us the latter in the most unlikely way imaginable in this context, i.e. those inserted musical sequences, which are incredibly well done, funny and highly inventive in a manner I don't think I've seen since the days of the Arthur-Freed-unit at MGM. That the combination of those disparate elements works so well may be the most astonishing aspect of the film. Great.

Shrew · #129 Post by **Shrew** » Sun Oct 11, 2015 9:14 pm

Rounding out China's big three Fifth Generation directors this decade...

Chen Kaige

Killing Me Softly (2002)
Chen’s so-far only English film finds him stuck trying to class up a silly erotic thriller past the genre’s expiration date. Heather Graham meets Joseph Fiennes on the street, they have some crazy intense sex, they quickly get married, and then Graham starts to wonder if maybe this possessive dude who beats up purse snatchers could be a murderer. The film does have good points: It looks good, the sex scenes are actually kind of sexy (it’s far more erotic than anything in Fifty Shades of Grey, yet another testament to cultural amnesia), there’s some nice London apartment porn, and Chen throws in some sweeping camera movements here and there, giving a sense of being swept off one’s feet to a ridiculous proposal scene. Plus, Fiennes’s romantic/brooding/am-I-going-to-fuck-you-or-eat-you-alive stare is erotic thriller distilled to its purest form. But in the end, this is just a dumb, silly film, with a particularly useless framing device and “shocking” twists.
R1 MGM

100 Flowers Hidden Deep (2002, Part of Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet)
This is just bad. Moving crew agrees to help some crazy guy, who gives a performance that overshoots Peewee Herman levels of grating, move his “house,” which is just an empty field. They humor him by pretending to move invisible future. At the end, they look back and see a house, animated in a faux-watercolor style. Ugh.

Together/Together with You (He Ni Zai Yiqi, 2002)
My recommendation here may get me into trouble, since this tale about a working-class father trying to make sure his violin-prodigy son gets the education he needs to become a star player is as sentimental as they come, and I ragged on Zhang pretty hard for that. But this is mostly “earned” sentiment, with the main kid having a much more complicated arc than just “I hate my dad cause he’s forcing to play music.” stuffing the tale with a wide range of characters with complicated motivations (including Chen himself). Detractors may find the film messy or overlong, but I think that helps cut the sentiment and make the film feel more organic. Easily Chen’s best of the decade.
R1 MGM OOP

The Promise (Wu Ji, 2005)
Once the most expensive film made in China (until it was outdone the next year by Curse of the Golden Flower, until that was outdone the next year by Red Cliff, until… you get the picture; note how two leads are played by Japanese and Korean actors, to maximize Asian profits), this is a huge, ambitious mess for such an undertaking. Unlike most other wu-xia films, this abandons a historical setting and goes full fantasy (though the US release still tries to place location names like “Land of Snows” on a map of China) and embrace a fairy tale logic. That’s great for the production design, which showcases a lot of stunning costumes (my favorite is the dash of pink beneath the duke’s spiky silver armor).

It’s less good for the plot. The fairy tale logic doubles down on Chen’s affinity for capricious, flawed characters, which may make the whole thing more or less palatable depending on your tolerance for such things. Hear, we have a young girl who, after stealing food from a corpse and running astray of a rich brat who wants to make her his slave, makes a deal with a goddess to become the most beautiful woman in the world in exchange for dooming anyone whom she falls in love with to die. Flash forward to a battle for a kingdom between an evil rebel duke and an arrogant general. Through some confusion, the general’s new slave, who can run so fast he can turn back time, dons the general’s armor and wins the woman’s heart. Then the general actually falls for her, and we’re stuck in a big awkward love triangle where everyone is doomed. Also there’s some other assassin with some guilt issues and another curse on his back.

This is all a bit silly and over the top, and in China, it quickly became an object of ridicule—the most famous attack being a youtube video reediting the film as a news report, with extra syncing to MC Hammer, entitled “The Bloody Murder Case That Started With a Steam Bun.” However, save for an eye-rolling final “twist,” the movie really isn’t that much dumber than most superhero flicks (indeed, it even borrows a few points straight from Donner’s Superman), and it throws itself whole-heartedly into its romance and tale of redemption.

Indeed, the film’s real weak spots are the effects. Some of the basic CGI looks fine, but any crowd scenes or long shots of buildings or landscapes look like lo-res demos from 1995. There are several sets that look fine at 180 degrees, but have jarring “4th walls” green-screened in to big them look bigger. The worst is a big stampede sequence that looks like a Looney Tune sequence (I’ve seen one critic defend it as being in the vein of Kung Fu Hustle’s cartoonishness, but the tone here is terribly off—some 3000 slaves are being crushed to death in the stampede!) Whatever passion the film has is often hard to appreciate under all that.

Note: US and UK releases are edited down by about 20 minutes. The cuts are all available on the US dvd as deleted scenes (don’t know about UK), and mostly expand the general’s character, making him less an arrogant prick and more an arrogant prick struggling against fate. But honestly, I don’t think the scenes add much to the film but redundant exposition; they certainly don’t fix any of the film’s larger problems. The more serious issue in the English release is that it also adds some awful opening narration over production art (and that dumb map), and its ending replaces the final shot with a repeat shot from the beginning, which is just dumb (it makes the nature of ending a bit clearer, but less “romantic”). I’d see this as a choice between a brisker version and an “extended” version (ala Peter Jackson) that may be interesting but not essential. For those who really want to see the original, there’s an unedited Hong Kong release available on Yes Asia (or just find it online).
RB G2 Films, R1 Warner; UNCUT: RABC Hong Kong

Forever Enthralled (Mei Lanfang, 2008)
A well-appointed biopic of China’s most famous Opera actor (who unintentionally inspired some of Brecht’s ideas about epic theater), with wonderful period production design and solid acting. It’s also not terribly exciting, and it gets less interesting as it passes through three different stages in Mei’s life without really getting much of his inner life or significance. This also hasn’t seemed to have gotten any release outside of Asia, which is unfair since it’s quite the production despite its flaws. I’d blame the subject matter, since Mei isn’t well-known abroad outside of Chinese studies and Chinese Opera is always a bit of acquired taste (plus, the fiasco of The Promise may well have soured foreign marketers on Chen).

The film is best when Mei is trying to break free of the conventions of Chinese opera and his own master to express more emotion, finding a sympathetic manager in Qiu Rushan, an academic who wants to incorporate more Western drama techniques into the Chinese theater. Later, he begins an affair with Zhang Ziyi’s male impersonator singer, which is less exciting but still has some tension. Finally, Mei parts with Qiu over whether to perform during the Japanese occupation, as a Japanese officer (a fan of Mei) tries to recruit him to the cause.

Perhaps reigning in from the fiasco of The Promise, Chen does everything properly and beautifully, but he doesn’t take any risks. Gone is most of the gender/sexuality confusion and play of Farewell, My Concubine, save for a moment when Qiu first sees Mei perform and writes him a later with some sublimating eroticism (which is henceforth forgotten). Since the subtext is largely abandoned, later, a distraught fan turned crossdresser does show up to announce his gender confusion, thus briefly elevating to the level of TEXT. This text is also promptly forgotten. It feels like Mei’s estate or other involved parties shaved off most of the unpolished bits of a more complicated screenplay, and what came out was some bland porridge gussied up as Organic Steel Cut Oats. That said, this isn’t a bad film; I’d even say that it’s above the level of the conventional Hollywood biopic. But it’s still a conventional biopic, albeit one that’s worth a look for anyone interested in Chen or Mei.
RABC Hong Kong OOP, R0 Hong Kong, available via Amazon

Tian Zhuangzhuang

Springtime in a Small Town (Xiaocheng Zhi Chun, 2002)
Tian returned from his long ban from filmmaking with this remake of China’s critically-approved national classic of repressed desire. It’s a very faithful remake, following most of the same camera setups, though not as slavishly as Van Sant’s Psycho. Still, it’s hard to see the point of this, when you could just go watch the original. Gone here is the immediacy found in the ruins of 1949 (bombed out by war). The house isn’t nearly dilapidated in the later film, but more than that the damage doesn’t embody the same psychological trauma. As a result, this can’t help but feel a bit sleepy, like an underperformed Chinese Masterpiece Theatre.
R1 Palm

Delamu (2004)
Documentary about the Tea-Horse Road through Yunnan, China, a southern ancient trade route like the Silk Road. Lots of gorgeous shots of mule-trains traveling through valleys and mountains. Tian intercuts this with interviews with various people living and traveling on the road, coming across a wide variety of people from different minority groups. That elevates it over the normal travelogue, and Tian gets some good footage of people eating and going about their daily lives, but there isn’t a whole lot here of interest outside of scenery and ethnology. Also features an awful synthesized/traditional Chinese score that often sounds one step above porn.
China DVD, OOP

The Go Master (Wu Qingyuan, 2006)
A fragmented biography of a major Chinese Go player, jumping throughout his life in the first half of the 20th century. Despite making a big fuss about how this great Chinese player is struggling to keep his identity while being raised and trained in Japan, the film really doesn’t explore Wu’s feelings at all, and is more concerned with how Wu’s success is a sore point for Japanese nationalism during the buildup to WWII. We jump from sedate sequence to sedate sequence, usually offering after-the-fact text on the screen that explains some skipped over event, making the whole thing hard to follow (though I was relying on Chinese subtitles, which makes it harder). For example, there’s a sequence where Wu becomes involved (and then disenchanted) with a female-led cult that comes out of nowhere ¾ into the film. All-in-all not particularly good, and not worth seeking out unless you’re a huge Tian fan (and particularly of his sleepy style in Springtime—I assume there must be someone out there).
R2 ICA Films

The Warrior and the Wolf (Lang Zai Ji, 2009)
Tian heads to far west China (even further than Horse Thief) for another fragmentary movie. This one’s about a frontier fort fighting native nomads high in the mountains. The men only go home when it snows and blocks off roads to the fort. Lu is a shepherd turned soldier who has trouble killing things and wants to run away. The fort’s general takes him under his wing and gets him to kill things, reluctantly. Eventually the general is injured and Lu somehow gets put in charge (I honestly have no clue how). Then, while retreating from the fort when the snows hit, he camps the army in a native village, where he finds a woman (Maggie Q) whose husband has been killed. He rapes her, then he feels bad; eventually they like each other, but apparently there’s a curse where if her people sleep with outsiders they become wolves?

Anyway, there’s some stunning nature cinematography of gorgeous mountains and sunsets mixed with some ugly desaturated grey/brown shit. The interior sequences, especially in the native village, are extremely dark, to the point where it’s hard to see anything. It’s a weird mix of gorgeous/ugly. I wasn’t the biggest fan of this (and again, only had Chinese subtitles, so I may not have caught everything), but it’s certainly more exciting than Tian’s other films this decade. It might be worth seeking out as long as you mark off the ugly Stockholm syndrome sexual politics as part of the shittiness of medieval life, particularly if you’re a fan of The Horse Thief.
RB Universal

#130 Post by **domino harvey** » Tue Nov 10, 2015 10:24 am

the Betrayed (Amanda Gusack 2009) Sometimes a movie is so bad in every possible way that you just end up feeling sorry for it. I pity this film, which does everything wrong. Inauthentic, even its cheap single set looks too much like a real abandoned warehouse room to look realistic (kind of like how real rain doesn't capture well on film). Embarrassing dialog and plot mechanics hound this wholly amateurish affair, which somehow got Melissa George to star (where I'm reasonably certain 90% of the budget went), though she seems only too aware of what a dog she's in. When Christian Campbell from Reefer Madness the Movie Musical is supposed to be a suave villain, you know a film completely strayed from the path.

Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (Mark Waters 2009) Matthew McConaughey plays the least likely photographer in film history in this updated version of the familiar Dickens story (the obvious parallels are openly mocked near the end in one of the few actual laughs) that finds McConaughey's repellent womanizer facing his fear of commitment via supernatural means. The film suffers from a fundamental flaw, one it never overcomes, in that its protagonist is such an awful human being and so shitty to women that it is impossible to care about his redemption. If anything, I felt sorry for poor Jennifer Garner for having to be saddled with this sure-to-fold asshole for the rest of her life. Michael Douglas does his best to make his ghostly "hip uncle" character more than a Playboy Party Joke, but he's not entirely successful.

the International (Tom Tykwer 2009) A lowkey business-heavy conspiracy film played with sterile coldness befitting the decor of most interior scenes, this is a mildly entertaining trifle that briefly perks up halfway through for a raucous, absurdly protracted shootout inside the Guggenheim which seems so out of place that if the same actors weren't present you'd swear a reel from a different film got inserted. Naomi Watts also stars for no particular reason, as her part could have been played by a sturdy coat rack.

13 Going On 30 (Gary Winick 2004) Doofy female-centered variation on Big that glides by a lot longer than it would otherwise on the appealing charms of Jennifer Garner's enthusiastic naif, the titular thirteen-year-old who wishes to be thirty ("and flirty") and has her prayers answered, with the usual results and lessons-learned. I liked the smaller jokes concerning Garner's middle school habits transferring to the world of fashion magazine editing (including sitting down for a Big Meeting and immediately writing her name in the top right hand corner of her paper) and there's a surprising amount of mileage to be gained from such a familiar premise. This is due in part to the film playing it more or less fair to its premise, such as when in one of the film's best and smartest scenes, Garner's adult bestie tells her to go talk to the hunk sitting behind her and she goes over and chats up... a thirteen year old boy eating dinner. Garner's insistence that grown men are "gross" makes her inevitable romantic encounters all the funnier, and it's fitting with the material. Mark Ruffalo is just there to be aww shucks cute, but why not given how many times the shoe is on the other foot in countless romantic comedies with a male protagonist?

I'm well aware that this is a fantasy, but there is a moment in this film in which even the most patient viewer will roll their eyes so far back into their head they too can see themselves as thirteen again: presented with the challenge of revamping a fashion mag, Garner decides to present a glorified yearbook, which ends up looking like a college brochure for a Christian college. This somehow wins everyone over. But, as I tell my students, sometimes in a movie you just have to shrug and go, "Well, that's Hollywood." I guess in a film in which magical wishing dust ages a girl seventeen years overnight, it's hard to productively nitpick much else. Recommended for those receptive to the pleasures of a film like this.

colinr0380 · #131 Post by **colinr0380** » Tue Nov 10, 2015 12:53 pm

I enjoyed The International quite a bit, though I can certainly understand the more muted reaction. This was a film that spoke to me more for the formal style and use of architecture (I still love that top down shot of the dispersing crowds after the assassination) than any of the particular dramatics or relationships between the characters. Though I'm a fan of 'colder' films in general!

bottled spider · #132 Post by **bottled spider** » Wed Nov 11, 2015 1:39 am

This little gem should not be overlooked:

Room and a Half (2009), AKA Sentimental Journey to the Motherland
("Poltory komnaty ili Sentimentalnoe puteshestvie na Rodinu")
director: Andrey Khrzhanovskiy
Joaeph Brodsky was expelled from the Soviet Union as a young man, and was never permitted to return while his parents were alive, nor even for their funerals, and they were never permitted to visit him abroad. This fictionalized biography imagines Brodsky returning to Russia later in life (something he never did). I don't know how to describe this strange film, so here is an IMDb review by someone who evidently knows what she or he is talking about:

English readers of Joseph Brodsky's Book of essays that won him the Nobel Prize(Less than One) will recognize the film's title as coming from an essay in the book: "A Room and a Half." It is both a real and a symbolic space to which the poet never returned. The Filmmaker's fantasy-plot, however, takes off by withholding one of the most famous of Brodsky's poetic line "To St. Basil's (Vasilievsky) Island I will come to die." For those familiar with these lines, their absence becomes a form of suspense - until the are spoken in the last scenes. The historical canvas of Brodsky's like unfolds against a stylistic montage from Shadow-silhouette cut-out of the prerevolutionary poetic-aristocratic world of Anna Akhmatova, Dmitri Merezhkovsky, etc. to the use of this avant-garde art form in service of the October Revolution. The Stalin-era film is the orange-tinged film stock of that era; the animation of the crows in the snow seems lifted from master animators of the 1970s. As a biography the film make me think most of Andrei Tarkovsky's "Mirror," which brings together the scraps of images, paintings, poetry in an attempt to find a new wholeness with stream-of-consciousness connections, seamlessly connecting documentary images of the real Brodsky and his friends (as in th scene shot in the Restaurant Russian Samovar" on 53rd St.), with imaginary meeting of parents and child in the afterlife.

I'm afraid I don't know anything about availability. I watched this on a Russian DVD lent by a Russian colleague. Not a great DVD, because the 4/3 English subtitles are stretched against the widescreen image -- perfectly legible, but the discrepancy in ratios is irritating and tiring to the eyes. There is some English on the DVD case: "Paradise Digital", and PAL, and the Region 5 symbol.

Added: there is a Region 2 available on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Room-Half-Region- ... and+a+Half" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Lemmy Caution · #133 Post by **Lemmy Caution** » Wed Nov 11, 2015 12:30 pm

I have a Dvd of that around here somewhere.
I think it's the R2 you linked to.
I seem to recall the dvd being of good quality, but can check if anyone is interested.
The film was fine and reasonably interesting, but I do remember feeling like I was missing a bunch, not being terribly familiar with Brodsky's poetry or life. I seem to recall the family stuff being the least interesting, and sort of a pivot for the film. But my recollection of it is a bit hazy.

colinr0380 · #134 Post by **colinr0380** » Sun Nov 15, 2015 8:00 pm

Princess Blade (Shinsuke Sato, 2001)

This is a weird film to decide whether to recommend or not. I sort of liked it, but the things I liked the most are not the aspects that it seems to have been marketed as having, but then I should have kind of guessed its action surface would conceal more interesting themes due to its lineage! This is based on a manga from Kazuo Koike, the writer behind Lone Wolf and Cub, Lady Snowblood (of which this is a kind of a sci-fi reinterpretation of, even including a use of an umbrella during a fight scene!) and Crying Freeman (which has a lot of parallels with the doomed love story surrounding an assassin with a moral code, which turns up again here). After watching Princess Blade I have to admit that I prefer the way all of those previous films and series dealt with their material, but there are some interesting aspects here also.

The most problematic part of the film is that Princess Blade appears to have been marketed as an all action sci-fi romp, with all of the most spectacular bits in this trailer and also mostly turning up in the first scene of the film in which we see the main character working as part of a group of assassins for hire ruthlessly cutting down their latest targets. However the rest of the action scenes even at the climax (and despite having Donnie Yen choreographing them) are rather underwhelming and feel choppily edited together for maximum effect, although rather than suggesting balletic or graceful movements most fights end with the characters flailing about through mid-air vaguely trying to hit something or the heroine getting thrown to the floor in an ungainly heap!

The 'all action' sense of the film is also immediately undermined by the heroine finding out on the eve of turning 20 that she was supposed to take over this clan of assassins but the truth of her heritage was hidden from her by the current leader, who also killed her mother. The heroine, Yuki, then goes on the run and ends up hiding in a truck driven by Takashi, who himself has a secret in his past and is currently part of a shady resistance terrorist bombing movement against a vaguely sketched in oppressive society. So of course when someone who was part of the most ruthless and merciless assassin for hire gang turns up, he is naturally a little wary!

The film both collapses and gets into my favourite section at this point, as it throws itself into Yuki and Takashi's tentative relationship at Takashi's modified petrol station-turned-home-turned-underground bunker. The action drops away almost entirely at this point, especially after Yuki goes to meet a contact, gets ambushed and then has her sword hand stabbed straight through with her own sword before escaping again. Instead we get Yuki recovering and lots of scenes taking place inside Takashi's, post-apocalyptic but still somehow comfortable, home as the pair get to know each other and Takashi introduces Yuki to his mute sister. Meanwhile the bad guy has an introspective monologue over how he wrested control of the clan from Yuki's mother, and the conflict between right to rule based on bloodline versus non-related power grabs.

I could see this long, long section (about fifty minutes of this ninety minute film) driving people crazy if they were waiting for some action! This is a rather introspective and sombre film that is much more about the inevitable changes of growing up as seen through the rather naive feeling eyes of youthful characters (I particularly love Yuki's monologue about having turned 20; then soon being 22, or the age when her mother had her; then soon 27, the age when her mother died; and wondering about her own role in the world) and the idea of people being betrayed by the organisations that were their whole world up to that point, all tied up with a kind of fatalistic atmosphere of inevitable death even whilst the characters are enjoying a few brief moments of respite. When both the members of Yuki's clan track her down and Takashi's terrorist employer simultaneously turns up to confront him, the action ends up being sort of underwhelming in both cases. Though each confrontation ends differently, both Yuki and Takashi cannot escape their past, and we end the film with Yuki's character in particular seeming like the somewhat bleak origin story for a much grander follow up film that just never arrived. In some ways Yuki is fated to continue the name of this notorious clan of assassins simply by continuing to exist at the end of the film, even at the same time as she disbands it. Inherited ruling bloodlines versus unaffiliated, interchangeably ambitious managers indeed!

Despite its rather downplayed post-apocalyptic setting (mostly swordfights in forests and generic trucks at a dusty petrol station, a little in the vein of, though nowhere near as gory as, Ryuhei Kitamura's Versus, which came out around the same time. Though there are also some interesting overgrown or dilapidated locations, and two slightly dodgy CGI shots of a sci-fi city and trains passing by that are slightly reminiscent of, but years before, Wong Kar-Wai's 2046!), I did end up feeling that there were a few interesting sci-fi influences in Princess Blade. Yuki's 'origin story' finale and bleak setting in general felt extremely similar to the first Mad Max (just replace the vehicles with swords and the wife and child with Takashi and his mute sister!). Also the nice though otherwise relatively understated electronic-symphonic score by the great composer Kenji Kawai goes into a kind of riff on Vangelis's Blade Runner in the final scene, which suddenly made me realise exactly why the mute sister kept leaving all of those origami animals lying around the place too!

(EDIT: Oh and Takashi's computer in his underground bunker has taken the same sound effects from Ridley Scott's Alien for its electronic log-in beeps! I guess if Ridley Scott could repurpose the computer screens from Alien into the computers inside the flying spinner vehicles in Blade Runner, I don't have a problem with the sound effects getting stolen for use here! Although Ridley Scott might!)

The strangest veiled influence though seems to have been 1984 in Takashi's plot of rebelling against the all controlling authorities of this society (he is even introduced driving in his truck and listening to the radio pumping out propaganda speeches), having a brief hope of a functioning home and romance with Yuki, and then a brutal crushing of all of that when he tries to put his plan to leave into action, rather than just continuing to participate in death wish bombing attacks. Though apart from the radio propaganda any specific 1984 reference is pushed well into the background and there would have needed to have been much more material in the film fleshing out the wider society for any sort of in depth societal critique to have been made, which we don't really get in this film with its far greater emphasis on Yuki and her fight with her clan.

I really liked the ideas that the film throws up, but I'm still on the fence about recommending this wholeheartedly. It is almost glacially slow and talky in the mid-section. I find that a few Japanese films have this issue (such as Parasite Eve, or Spiral, or even something like Takashi Miike's One Missed Call or Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse) where the action drops away almost entirely for a much more interior and measured relationship-focused approach, so I guess it might be a cultural thing? I often really like this approach when I manage to attune myself to the correct mindset, but I could see this driving someone who may have been drawn in by the action marketing to distraction, or to sleep! I ended up feeling quite the opposite though - that the action scenes themselves started to feel as if they were an unnecessary and slightly aggravating addition to the film at the end! Maybe that is why the duel between Yuki and the main bad guy Byakurai ends up feeling so perfunctory?

#135 Post by **domino harvey** » Tue Nov 17, 2015 10:24 am

My mainstream movie investigation continues to be produce poor returns:

How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (Donald Petrie 2003) I only had this in my possession because one of my friends recommended it to me after my last breakup, as my ex actually did one of the outrageously crazy things the characters foist on each other. Unfortunately, though the premise is sound for a good screwball comedy-- both partners have made a bet with their colleagues negating the other's actions in the relationship (I can make anyone fall for me / I can make anyone break up with me)-- the film rarely exploits the comic potential, and in fact forgets to be funny in any way, shape, or form. This might legit be one of the least funny romantic comedies I've ever seen, and the stars have zero chemistry with each other. Not really sure how Kate Hudson ever had a career based on her work here. This film can go frost itself.

Legally Blonde (Robert Luketic 2001) A dumb movie celebrating a chipper spirit in as asinine a manner possible. Everyone who isn't Reese Witherspoon either hates Reese Witherspoon or loves Reese Witherspoon, there's no room for shades of characterization here in this tale of a sorority girl who dubiously finds her way into Harvard Law. The film makes pains to show Witherspoon's character as smart, but this seems only to extend towards a cleverness befitting a Cosmo column writer. When the big courtroom trial finale hinges on a mistake so dumb that anyone would have caught it, it's hard to celebrate our protagonist's alleged brilliance.

Legally Blonde 2: Red White & Blonde (Charles Herman-Wurmfeld 2003) An even dumber movie than the first, but ultimately a slightly better one. The same premise of the first film-- everyone is mean to Reese Witherspoon until they aren't-- is transplanted to Washington DC this time, and no one involved in the film gives a shit about what they're doing, which at least gives it a light and breezy feel. Not especially funny, but there are some mild attempts at visual dynamism and embracing the stupidity of the underlying premise.

Mr Brooks (Bruce A Evans 2007) Overstuffed with enough plot strands to sustain three or four films you don't want to see, this weird movie has boldness of premise in its favor-- Kevin Costner is the titular serial killer, who receives constant advice from his imaginary friend William Hurt-- but little else working for it. To give you some idea of how far from the farm this movie wanders, it ends with a terribly cheap joke of an ending, only to upend that awfulness by making it even worse when it's revealed

SpoilerShow

to only be a dream... Completely spineless filmmaking, right there.

That said... I understand the cult that's developed around this film. It's terrible, and yet I cannot deny I was never bored and it is embarrassingly entertaining in spite of itself. I would never recommend this film, but I probably wouldn't turn my nose up at seeing it again either.

colinr0380 · #136 Post by **colinr0380** » Tue Nov 17, 2015 1:10 pm

Miss Congeniality (or perhaps Never Been Kissed?) seems to have had a lot to answer for in kicking off that series of 'fish out of water finding the strength within to have a makeover and finally prove themselves' trend. These films despite their empowering message weirdly often manage to make a lot of the surrounding women bitchily horrible though! At least until they realise the importance of friendship and female solidarity to band together to fight off the truly bad guys!

Of course the best of the bunch is The House Bunny, with its incredibly minor trials of life standing almost in satirical contrast to the terrorism plot of Miss Congeniality or the law career aspirations of Legally Blonde! (I especially love the final empowering speech to sway a stuffy teacher council through the power of friendship being entirely pointless!) Its almost a gender swapped Revenge of the Nerds!

EDIT: Speaking of rom-coms, I recently watched this:

New In Town (Jonas Elmer, 2009)

This feels like a slightly late addition to the small collection of films that were popular in the early 1990s about a brusque, lonely businessman from the callous big city coming to a close knit small town to destroy their livelihoods and after going through a culture shock of disgust and horror steadily gets charmed by the townsfolk and their homely, homily ways of life and compassionate business practices. The character also usually falls in love (as an embodiment of falling in love with the community as a whole), though ends up complicating that love affair by a third act betrayal in which they are forced to choose between their core values, before it all gets resolved with a happy ending. The main difference here is that instead of Peter Riegert in Local Hero, Hugh Grant in Sirens, Danny DeVito in Other People’s Money or Anthony Hopkins in Spotswood (or at a stretch Michael Douglas in The Game, which played around with this trope most interestingly), the gender has been swapped and we have here Renée Zellweger as the no nonsense career woman parachuted into a Minnesotan town to restructure a factory and lay off most of the workforce.

The Minnesotan setting also suggests that New In Town is a film that is kind of indebted to Fargo, though it is far gentler and with fewer rough edges than the Coen brothers’ film, for all its relative tweeness, had!

New In Town is a pretty standard film other than the basic gender swap however, which kind of causes a few problems of its own which were not quite there in the same way when a man was playing that kind of character. Perhaps it is just that a hard hearted businessman with no life beyond his job is just a standard trope now and it seems somehow more monstrous or parodical when a woman is in that role? It is not a dealbreaker for me but it can feel a little jarring and I could see an audience wanting to see a strong female character getting quite incensed by the heartless, rude monster at the beginning of the film beginning to feel again and needing the love of a good man to set her straight! Though I don’t think this was intentionally demeaning by the filmmakers at all, as the predatory man being tamed by the love of a good woman has been a standard trope itself, and this film has basically just swapped genders whilst keeping the basic story structure. Something which interestingly highlights the manipulations of the narrative in all these kinds of films, so I think that makes New In Town quite a valuable addition!

It also has a fantastic supporting cast too, particularly including J.K. Simmons as a gruff and blunt plant manager and Siobhan Fallon Hogan as the secretary and almost community liaison or outreach representative to Zellweger’s character! (She might not be a huge name, but I still indelibly remember this actress from her small but key roles in Lar von Trier’s films – part of the ensemble of Dogville and she was especially memorable in Dancer In The Dark, in which she played the death row jailer tending to Selma and taking her on her “107 Steps” to be executed at the end of that film)

The film feels rather blunt and blundering at times, and it is a film in which our proactive businesswoman’s turning point into a feeling and caring person begins to occur when she uses her red undergarments as a distress flag after running her car into a snow drift! (I wonder if this was meant to play as a homage to The Railway Children. I’m guessing not, but it is a similar use!), but it is quite charming in its naivety and earnest messages about the importance of love and community. As with all of these films it cannot really satisfactorily resolve the big issues it raises of factories getting shut down with the devastation of the community that surrounds them without having to bring up desperate last act race against time plans to save the plant with a wacky, totally unauthorised by upper management, make or break idea or plan to turn a business into a starry-eyed community owned collective operation in order to provide an easy solution to everyone’s problems and some relatively uplifting closure to the drama. In particular the film has a wonderful, though horribly, heartbreakingly naïve if seen in real world terms, moment in which Zellweger manages to save the factory from closing by preparing a new product line from a secretary’s secret family recipe and announcing to the grumpy Head Manager who visits wondering why the factory has not been closed yet that they managed to do this entirely by using “the old equipment and the old workforce!”, instead of the latest high tech mechanised equipment and none of the old, experienced hands. I’d love to live in these worlds where the crisis is conclusively over at the end rather than only just beginning!

Shrew · #137 Post by **Shrew** » Sat Nov 21, 2015 6:27 pm

While the Sixth Generation is probably the most relevant group of Chinese filmmakers beyond Zhang Yimou to us artsy-fartsy listmakers on the forum, I’ve still got a film or two I need to hunt down for each of the major members before I can finish proper write-ups (Dong for Jia, In Love We Trust for Wang Xiaoshuai, Spring Fever for Lou Ye, everything Zhang Yuan). So here’s a detour into more “commercial” filmmakers, though these two straddle the line between regular commercial filmmaking and more artistic pursuits.

Jiang Wen
Devils on the Doorstep (Guizi Laile, 2000)
This was my spotlight last time around the 2000s as well as for the war project, so really if you haven’t watched this yet, you owe it to yourself (also you hurt my feelings, wah). But here’s the quick pitch: Hapless farmers are stuck hiding a captured Japanese soldier and his Chinese translator under the nose of a Japanese naval base, unique mix of suspense and hilarity ensues. Gorgeous b/w scope cinematography. Dripping with gallows humor and Bunuelian absurdism (the prisoners are delivered by an unseen figure who only identifies itself as “me,” which the villagers take very literally). Deconstruction of heroism and “sides” among common people and soldiers in war. There’s not much more I can say, except that it’s the I-will-break-into-your-house-strap-you-to-a-chair-and-force-you-to-watch-it-a-la-Clockwork-Orange kind of recommendation.
R1 HVE, OOP

The Sun Also Rises (Taiyang Zhaochang Shengqi, 2007)
Nothing to do with Hemingway, this beautiful magical realist mess is Jiang’s return to filmmaking after his 7 year ban from Devils. There are four loosely connected episodes—in Southern China, a young man struggles with his crazy tree-climbing mother, whose madness resembles something of a Daoist Sage; just before the Cultural Revolution, a ladykiller professor (Anthony Wong, Johnny To’s usual muse) is accused of perversion (but a doctor (Joan Chen) who has a crush on him is willing to her ass be groped to prove his innocence—or to entrap him? Yes, this involves a police line-up of blindfold groping); the professor’s friend (Jiang Wen) is later sent down for re-education to the country, where his wife has an affair with the young man from the first story; and a flashback to Russian/Chinese soldiers in the desert of Xinjiang connects (almost) all the characters.

The film is absolutely gorgeous, and Jiang has a fantastic eye and a kinetic way with the camera, so it’s worth a recommendation purely on the aesthetic level, and the tone is often light and jokey enough to make it far less of a slog than most cinematographic pornography. It’s a better attempt to present magical realism on screen than Beloved or Love in the Time of Cholera. However, the film’s embrace of the genre’s elliptical narratives and ambiguous signifiers makes it difficult to follow and comprehend. It often feels as if it’s supposed to be allegorical but the object of that allegory is never clear.

As such, there are many images or scenes that are “profound” or striking on their own, but float by like smoke without fire. The bookending segments (focused on the crazy mother) in particular are so overrun by abstraction and whimsy that they threaten to become a quirkfest. The first works only because Jiang wisely anchors the segment in the son’s struggle to deal with his mother’s mad whims, and the last because it’s only 15 minutes or so. The second segment at the university is far more grounded, and you can easily read a satire of the Cultural Revolution’s political in-fighting in the witch hunt for a pervert driven by women obsessed with a man, but the ending comes across as sudden and unearned against the preceding frivolity. A lot of this ambiguity may also be due to Jiang Wen trying to play it safe after being banned from filmmaking twice. Whatever the reason, it means the film is merely good and pretty instead of great.
Unfortunately, I believe the only DVD was from HK and it’s OOP, though there is a VCD on YesAsia. I’d suggest backchannels.

Lu Chuan
The Missing Gun (Xun Qiang, 2002)
Lu is a younger filmmaker who doesn't fit with the sixth generation or other movements (he's certainly not much interested in urban alienation) and shows heavier influence from kinetic US/UK filmmakers like Scorsese, Spielberg, or even Tarantino. His first film out the Beijing Film Academy shows off a talented student’s stylistic glee. A police officer (Jiang Wen) in a small rural town loses his gun after a bender and desperately tries to retrace his steps to find it. Along the way he seeks help from a colorful set of friends and deal with strained marriage. Eventually, his ex-girlfriend ends up dead and he’s blamed for the crime. The story is a straight-forward whodunit with lots of red herrings and twists trying to hide a fairly obvious subject (made more obvious by the structure of the story), but it’s still a good amount of fun. In the vein of the French New Wave, Lu has a lot of energy and is obviously relishing the chance to throw as many stylistic tricks as he can up on screen. It really enlivens the film, but without ever getting so grating that it becomes a Guy Ritchie film. Still, the film’s a bit rough and hollow, but it’s the first glimpse at a distinctive voice in Chinese cinema.
R1 Sony, OOP (but cheap)

Mountain Patrol:Kekexili (2004)
On Kekexili plateau, at the foot of the Himalayas, a journalist follows a volunteer patrol group trying to protect the endangered population of Tibetan antelope from poachers. From the opening scene wherein a group of poachers capture a lone patrolman, it’s clear that this isn’t the usual feel-good environmentalist tale but something far more harrowing and brutal. Lu’s filmmaking is less showy than in his first film, and the more mature style is ideally suited to the film’s mix of sparse vistas, slow-building suspense, and frenetic action sequences. While the Kekexili makes for beautiful photography, the film never forgets just how hostile it is, and nature is a much greater threat to the patrol than the poachers they’re chasing. It’s a tense, unrelenting film, which makes for great survival tale that lends much-needed weight to what could be just a simplistic ecological message (Poaching is bad!)

From a sociocultural perspective, the film is also interesting in its portrayal of Chinese minorities. The patrol is largely made up of local Tibetans (and the poachers are mostly Chinese). Chinese media heavily orientalizes minority groups, dressing them up in questionable “traditional” costumes and connecting them to nature and mysticism. There’s a common refrain that minorities are good at “singing and dancing.” Some of that is reflected here, like in one scene where the patrol starts to dance around a campfire, and of course there’s the central plot of men risking it all for a bunch of animals, but it feels organic rather than stereotypical. Further, the Tibetans are the agents of the story, as they’re the ones organizing the patrols without government approval, and are portrayed as far more “masculine” than usual. This all adds another dimension to the fight between the locals and the poachers. Again, it’s a pretty unique film in this decade of Chinese film, combining naturalistic filmmaking with a more energetic “American” style.
R1 Sony, OOP (but cheap)

City of Life and Death (Nanjing! Nanjing!, 2009)
I covered this in the War thread previously. Lu’s attempt at big prestige picture is perfectly serviceable but rarely groundbreaking. The stories of several individuals interweave during the horrific “Rape of Nanjing” by Japanese forces: a sensitive Japanese soldier is haunted by guilt, a young Chinese boy narrowly escapes death again and again, a Chinese clerk tries to safeguard his family, John Rabe (a Nazi factory owner) tries to protect as many Chinese as he can a la Schindler, a bright Chinese student is forced to become a comfort woman. It shares with Kekexili an unrelenting grimness that builds toward catharsis, but at three hours and stuffed with so many stories, one can’t help but start to become inured to the horror. In short, it’s well made and worth a look, but even though it focuses on a horror much-less-filmed than the Holocaust (and one sadly still far more controversial), it doesn’t add much new to the compendium of war’s horrors on film.
RA Kino Lorber, RB High Fliers

Next up will be some other even more "commercial" filmmakers: Feng Xiaogang, He Ping, Zhang Yang.

#138 Post by **swo17** » Sun Nov 29, 2015 2:03 am

Only about two months left until the deadline, if you can believe it. I guess it's about time I recommended some shorts:

Spotlight: Gravity (Nicolas Provost)
Probably best known for the lovely/frightening Papillon d'amour (wherein select frames from Rashomon are put through a mirror effect), Provost's other experiments with cinematic syntax and iconography are well worth watching. For example, Plot Point dramatizes anonymous street footage by accompanying it with cliched sound cues (which I think he does even better in 2010's Stardust). And my favorite is Gravity, which cuts quickly back and forth between various famous screen kisses with dizzying results. Or to put it in layman's terms, Cary Grant kisses everyone, including people he wasn't in movies with, including himself. There are several terrible looking rips of this available on YouTube and elsewhere (don't even bother with those), but thankfully there is a passable HD rip available through backchannels.

Spotlight: Spanky: To the Pier and Back (Guy Maddin)
A complete throwaway of a film (which I believe was made simply to serve as an extra on the original My Winnipeg DVD) that never ceases to floor me whenever I see it. And I don't even really like dogs. Maddin honors the memory of his cherished pet by editing footage of their final walk together in a style that calls to mind both Fischinger's Walking from Munich to Berlin and Le Grice's Little Dog for Roger.

Mirror Mechanics (Siegfried A. Fruhauf)
This whole Index DVD is pretty great but if you only have time to watch 7 minutes of it, this is probably the strongest film on it. Fruhauf is working in somewhat similar territory to Provost's mirror films here, but to be frank, those look almost childish in comparison to the shimmering, hypnotic effects achieved here.

Ortem (Dariusz Kowalski)
Another fine Index DVD, where this is actually a bonustrack. I suppose this is just a simple train film (paging zedz!), digitally shot and intentionally shaky/sped up, but there's something about it that keeps me returning to it.

Picture Again (Linda Christanell)
And one last Index DVD, not necessarily an essential one, but this film does a nice job with superimpositions, many involving Double Indemnity.

Light Is Calling / Outerborough (Bill Morrison)
I believe I mentioned these earlier in the thread, my favorites from the BFI/Icarus sets.

The Red and the Blue Gods (Ben Russell)
Vimeo link
If you see only one film for this project about guys in masks dancing on the beach...well, I can't tell you how to live your lives.

Combo (Blu & David Ellis)
Vimeo link
Big Bang Big Boom made a bit of a splash in our animation list, with its unique approach of animating graffiti out in the real world. This works just as well or maybe even better, because instead of calling to mind bigger issues, it exists purely as a celebration of its own existence.

Skagafjördur (Peter Hutton)
More stunning landscape shots from Hutton, this time focusing largely on the clouds and mountains of Iceland. Should also work in a pinch if you only have half an hour to watch a James Benning film.

Incident by a Bank (Ruben Östlund)
Well choreographed single-shot film reenacting a botched robbery attempt. Tonally consistent with the later Force Majeure.

Merde (Leos Carax) [segment from Tokyo!]
Later incorporated into Holy Motors, where there was sadly no time to fit in the leprechan-Godzilla character's trial and execution.

14th Arrondissement (Alexander Payne) [segment from Paris, je t'aime]
Margo Martindale is your mom writing home from France.

Sheena Is a Parasite (Chris Cunningham) Link
Ever since colin recommended this during the horror project, I can't stop watching it.

Grenzfälle der Schadensregulierung (Alexander Kluge)
Peter Berling as an insurance expert, fielding the questions you've always wondered about but been afraid to ask. There's zero cinematic value here, which is part of the film's charm.

The Meaning of Life / Rejected (Don Hertzfeldt)
See how fondly the director remembers his key films from this decade in a recent Kickstarter update:

work continues on the blu-ray. the aforementioned total loss of our original HD masters of THE MEANING OF LIFE and REJECTED was probably a blessing in disguise, as the new 4K scans of those two films are just stunning. THE MEANING OF LIFE looks like a whole new movie, there's detail and color depth in these frames that i've never been able to see before... down to stray pencil marks and impressions on the paper that were previously only visible if you had the original artwork in front of you. it's really amazing stuff. and REJECTED, meanwhile... uh... well, that one still has a guy bleeding to death out of his ass.

Shrew · #139 Post by **Shrew** » Fri Dec 04, 2015 8:35 pm

I feel like I'm choking this thread with long posts about Chinese films no one has seen. Sorry! I'll post about something else soon. I'm trying to catch up on mumblecore on the side, I'm sure every one is dying to have a conversation about that right?

Feng Xiaogang
Until recently easily China’s most successful commercial filmmaker, Feng is often compared to Spielberg. It’s not an unfair assessment--both share a keen visual eye and tendency toward sentiment—but while he has expanded into other genres, Feng’s best films are still comedies. Yet even his most joke-filled films have moments more nakedly manipulative than Spielberg on even his teariest days. That mish-mash of tones can be traced through a lot of Chinese cinema (including one of my recurring recommendations, Street Angel), but Feng’s worst films can still feel schizophrenic or ingratiatingly patronizing, like a late Adam Sandler flick. Fortunately, most of his films from this decade on show a skilled mastery of tone that evens out the kinks, and there are moments (as with Spielberg) where the sentiment even works.

A Sigh (Yi Sheng Tanxi, 2000)
Feng’s first film of the decade is atypical but one of his best—a keenly focused story of an affair free of the maudlin subplots that can upset his more comedic films. A novelist turned TV writer begins an affair with a production assistant just as he and his wife are planning to move into a new home. The whole thing comes to light, and he finds himself trying to start a new life with his mistress while being pulled back by his family. Adultery was and is a sensitive topic with Chinese censors, not unlike Hollywood under the Hays Code, but Feng does a great job of reserving judgment and sympathizing with all three parties, even as it heads towards an ending that reinforces standard “morality.” Feng also mostly avoids his sentimental tendencies, and handles the whole thing with a light, delicate touch. Unfortunately hard to find, but it’s out there on back channels.

Big Shot’s Funeral (Dawan, 2001)
Feng’s usual star, Ge You, is hapless cameraman You You, hired to film a making-of documentary about a big Hollywood director’s (Donald Sutherland) remake of The Last Emperor in Beijing. Sutherland is stuck in a creative rut and soon succumbs to health issues, but not before making You You promise to give him a “comedy funeral.” So You You plans a big over-the-top production in the Forbidden Palace, and finances it by selling ad space all over the event—including the corpse (hanging the lampshade on the product placement that will become increasingly rampant in Feng’s films).

This was the first US-China co-production following Crouching Tiger, but it only made a few hundred dollars in a handful of US theaters. It’s definitely hampered by its English portions—Sutherland doesn’t do much with his often stiff dialogue, and Rosamund Kwan as his assistant is even more stilted (Paul Mazursky also shows up as a producer who briefly harangues Sutherland about the project, for everyone who wanted to know what he was up to post-Scenes from a Mall). The Chinese stuff is better, save for the required D.O.A. romance between Ge and Kwan. Ge You is always a solid comedic presence, both as a straight man to his zanier faux-European partner Louis, and as the clueless but dedicated anchor during some of the more over-the-top send-ups of the advertising blitz. For all its rough bits, this is still probably the best entry point for Feng’s brand of comedy.
R1, 2 Sony

Cell Phone (Shouji, 2003)
Sort of A Sigh 2.0, Feng delivers another melodrama about affairs, when a popular talk show host (Ge You, again)’s wife intercepts a mistress’s call on his cell phone. Soon, Ge is divorced and barred from seeing his children, but he soon starts trying to balance relationships with both a level-headed professor and his former mistress, a young would-be actress and drama queen. Soon, the crazy girl records Ge sleeping with her (with her fancy new cell phone!) and blackmails him, and everything goes further south. This film lacks the perceptive, underplayed quality of A Sigh, though it tries to make up for it with more thematic subtext, juxtaposing rural/urban, past/present China, and how changes in technology have affected privacy and relationships in China. It gets points for avoiding histrionic confrontations between the various parties and 2/3 of the film runs smoothly, but the final act brings out all the films underlying melodrama and technophobia with that final act. Also there are a looooooot of close-ups of phones that you could buy circa 2003, just in case you were in the market for any cool Motorola flip phones that you can take pictures and record audio with!
This and all the Feng films below are available in the Hong Kong set Collection Feng Xiaogang. This film is interlaced but the other films are okay quality. Sadly, I’m not sure of other reliable sources with English subs, though there is probably some fine backchannel stuff.

A World Without Thieves (Tianxia Wu Zei, 2004)
Another more serious-leaning film from Feng, but more hampered by an uneven mix of tones. A couple (Andy Lau and Rene Liu) that live by stealing from rich assholes find themselves on a train trying to protect a naive migrant worker traveling with his life savings from a much more ruthless gang of thieves (lead, again, by Ge You). Shagen (“Dumb Root”), the worker/country bumpkin, represents all the good-ol socialist values of selflessness and faith in his fellow man, but is so super-idealized that he is literally friends with the local wolf population. However, Feng gets some interesting tension as Lau and Liu argue whether to simply protect Shagen or try to maintain his idealistic illusion of “a world without thieves,” and the back and forth between the two sets of thieves under Shagen’s nose makes for some clever set-pieces. But the film’s final act goes off the rails, throwing in a new out-of-left-field set of bumbling idiot thieves along with a grandly maudlin attempt at pathos. Worth a look, but not Feng’s best work.
R1, 2 Tartan

The Banquet/Legend of the Black Scorpion (Ye Yan, 2006)
An adaptation of Hamlet (take note for any future Shakespeare list projects). If you’re one of those people who hates the play because of Hamlet’s long agonizing over action/inaction and general mopiness, this adaptation may drive you insane; I’m pretty sure no one could ever outmope our hero here, who starts off the film in political exile hoping to become an actor/poet. Fortunately the film transfers agency to Zhang Ziyi’s much younger Gertrude figure, here originally betrothed to (and in love with) the prince before the dead emperor decided to take her for a wife. This is Zhang’s film, and she does a good job balancing the character’s ambitions with her conflicting feelings toward the prince and the Claudius figure (Ge You), who also does a great job as a sympathetic villain. As an adaptation, it’s of interest in how it maintains many of the original’s key elements but rearranges them to form a new dramatic arc; for example, the murder of the old emperor is an open secret from the start, but the “play to catch the conscience of the king” remains, becoming instead part of the climax along with the classic poisoned goblet (the recipients of which also change around).

The film is a blatant attempt to cash in on the brief international wu-xia craze launched by Crouching Tiger but like most of Feng’s films it didn’t make any impact in the West. In fact, aside from some awkward inserts of kung-fu action (the worst bit being a “do-you-remember-the-kung-fu-we-learned-as-kids?” fight between Zhang and XXX), the film eschews most of marketable formulas seen in Zhang Yimou’s contemporaneous wu-xia. This is, like its source, very dark, and Feng gives the film a matching dark palate—everything is brown, dark reds, dark emerald green, and the only bright parts are “mourning” white. You can argue that this is a less “self-orientalizing” approach than Zhang’s exotic entertainments, instead trying to appeal to the west by adapting a major text of the Western canon (and provide some possible allegory of political intrigue in China). As long as you can get past the Prince of Mopes (whose role is again fortunately reduced), I hardily recommend this over Zhang’s similarly-themed Curse of the Golden Flower.
RA Dragonnasty, u the dumb title, RB Metrodome, under The Banquet

Assembly (Jijie Hao, 2007)
Another very serious film, and basically a Chinese take on Saving Private Ryan, based on a true story ™. During the Chinese Civil War, a captain’s squad is all killed but him while defending a river pass, but a lack of records means the battle and he are forgotten. He then drifts through the Korean War and China’s rebuilding, until in retirement he devotes himself to finding the bodies of his unit and having their sacrifice recognized. Since this is a 21st century war film, that means lots of desaturated colors and excessive gore, but mixed with a long and quiet second half with the hero navigating bureaucracy and the political situation (though the Cultural Revolution is reduced to a brief scene of the old soldier acting incredulous about being questioned). The film’s extended time frame means a protracted narrative that elides a lot of major dramatic points, though Feng squeezes the sentiment out of what’s there. The whole thing could have really been improved with a few decisions to focus on either the war scenes or the later struggle for affirmation, but I imagine there was a good deal of pressure from producers to include more battle scenes in a “war” film.
UK RABC Metrodome

If You Are the One (Fei Cheng Wu Rao, 2008)
Feng’s last film of the decade finds him at the top of his tone-juggling game, weaving together some zany satire of China’s nouveau riche with some of most earned pathos. Ge You (again) is a jack-of-all-trades who gets rich selling off a ridiculous invention and puts out an online ad looking for a wife. The film is split between Ge interviewing various ridiculous candidates (including a former colleague now out of the closet, a tombstone saleswoman, a widow who wants no sex, etc) and his friendship/flirtation with Smiley (Shu Qi), who is caught in a bad relationship with a married man. Any ickiness from the 20 year old age difference between the leads is played down by Shu’s world-weary performance and Ge’s usual sarcasm-masking-feeling approach. Feng even manages to modulate his sentimental side for most of the film, getting a moving monologue from Ge You about a dead ex, and a sweet (if tangential) scene with a friend of Ge’s singing a song to himself after they part waves. Unfortunately the climax tries to raise the emotional stakes way too high, and it hard not to roll your eyes at what’s meant to be tragic.

The film also benefits from looking really great, especially for a comedy, with strong cinematography and great production values, though that’s also a bit of a weakness. With Ge You’s new wealth granting him access to the best China has to offer, the film really doubles down on the aspirational aspect, which is more problematic considering how much the film relies on product placement. Generally I feel that product placement isn’t as bad as most people’s knee-jerk reaction, but Feng does really push it, sometimes to the detriment of the film. The nice downbeat monologue mentioned above is tragically undercut by an obtrusive insert shot of Ge You’s credit card. And there’s so much wealth on display (and empty space, which in China, really means wealth) that the film seems to take place in a completely different world than say, any Jia Zhangke film, or even any of Feng’s previous films (which is indicative of how quickly the wealth gap in China grew in the last decade). But I’d still recommend it as a well-crafted and fun “popular” film out of China.
RABC HK Blu, OOP; R0 Taiseng

Zhang Yang
If Feng is China’s Spielberg, then Zhang might be a Ron Howard or Robert Zemeckis or even a Stanley Kramer. He is technically skilled with artistic ambitions and many of his films address social issues, but they are often too strident or sentimental to be natural. Like the Sixth Generation, Zhang started as an independent, but through official state-approved means, and he is at heart a crowd-pleaser (even when his dramas take darker turns) and tends to reaffirm traditional values while exploring more marginal lifestyles. This all makes for a talented filmmaker who keeps putting out stuff that on-message (for the Chinese state) but slightly off color.

Quitting (Zuotian, 2001)
An ambitious attempt to deal with drug addiction (still a pretty taboo subject in China) starring Jia Hongwei (star of Suzhou River) as himself, along with his real parents, sister, friends, some mental patients, and hospital staff. Zhang restages Jia’s years long struggle to get off drugs with his family’s help, overlapping with interviews and occasionally pulling back to reveal that everything is taking place on a stage set. This might sound more interesting than it is. Conceptually, the film’s a mess, with none of varying stabs at depth coming together. The struggle of Jia’s parents with their own troubles while he heaps capricious abuse on them is the most compelling part of the film, but also tends toward the most histrionic (in the film’s most clever moment, the apex of this drama takes place on the “stage”). Due to China’s censorship laws, the drug stuff is never shown and addressed in a semi-hysterical manner one step above Reefer Madness.

But worst of all, the drug issues serve as a smoke screen for Jia’s more serious mental issues (the film briefly plays with—and then denies—schizophrenia, but at the least the guy has serious clinical depression or bipolar issues), and both Jia’s family and the state are horrifyingly unable to recognize or address this. The “treatment” is a new-wavey mix of self-reflection, discipline, love, and trust. That’s fine and obviously Jia recovered enough to make this film, but the dark epilogue here is his suicide in 2010. This film is indicative of Zhang’s work is general—it’s overwhelmingly earnest and has some ambition, but it can’t help but feel misguided.
R1 Sony

Sunflower (Xiang Ri Kui, 2005)
Probably Zhang’s most balanced film of the decade, though less audacious than the others. A young boy’s father, a painter, returns from re-education after the Cultural Revolution with his hands too broken to paint professionally. Instead he forces his rebellious son to paint, starting 30 years of generational bickering. Again, Zhang addresses some major social issues (abortion gets some play here), but here from a much more personal view (and without having to dance around a taboo topic), which makes for a more affecting film. The first of the films three segments feels a lot like Tian’s The Blue Kite in its focus on a courtyard community coming together (and splintering) during trying times. The later segments evolve and complicate the father-son dynamic, but aren’t quite as memorable and the film ends like how you’d expect it. All in all, this is conventional but effective filmmaking, powered by strong performances.
R1 New Yorker, OOP

Getting Home (Luo Ye Gui Gen, 2007)
A poor migrant worker tries to bring his friend’s corpse back to his hometown, propping him up on buses (with shades to hide his eyes) and carrying him on his back. Yes this is Chinese Weekend at Bernie’s, but with a social point about how life sucks for migrant workers. That said, our hero (Zhao Benshan, also in the big Zhang’s Happy Times) is a simple worker filled with boundless optimism and determination to see his friend home with little complaint, so there’s not much bite to the satire. Mostly it’s a picaresque where we run into lots of famous Chinese actors who are alternately incredulous or overly helpful (including one random homesteading couple that keeps bees). There’s some decent low-key black humor (less crude than ol’ Bernie) and some satirical edge, but like with Quitting, Zhang’s better at identifying an issue than diagnosing or addressing it.
R1 Global Lens, also free streaming via Amazon Prime

I was also going to mention He Ping (a sort of not-quite Fifth Generation hanger-on), since I had access to both his films from this decade, but neither are particularly good. Warriors of Heaven and Earth is an overlong attempt to cash in on the 2000s wu xia boom (also including a Japanese star for that sweet, sweet yen), with some “Turkish-face” portrayals of China’s western minorities, an overabundance of boring cannon fodder, and some mystical Buddhist MacGuffin. Wheat has the not-quite-the-next-Zhang-Ziyi-but-not-for-lack-of-her-agent-trying Fan Bingbing leading a village of women after all their husbands have gone to war and taking in a pair of AWOL soldiers from the opposing side (one of whom is dumb and never bothers to wear pants: hilarity).

Next: Jia Zhangke, but you should already be watching all his films. Why haven’t you watched Platform or The World yet? Whatever the reason is, it’s not good enough.

#140 Post by **swo17** » Fri Dec 04, 2015 8:49 pm

What if my reason is that I can't stop watching Still Life?

This thread is starving, thanks for feeding it.

Michael Kerpan · #141 Post by **Michael Kerpan** » Fri Dec 04, 2015 9:48 pm

Feng: I guess I liked World Without Thieves a lot more than you, despite the awkwardnesses you pointed out. I would say that If You Are the One is definitely his best film of the decade (and best entry point into his work). Big Shot's Funeral has some hilarious moments, but some thudding ones as well. Still plenty of fun. I liked The Banquet but still preferred ZY's Court Filled With Golden Armor (much more evocative than the dumb English title). Assembly was interesting, but not a favorite. Never have caught up with Cell Phone.

ZHANG Yang: Haven't seen Quitting, but liked the others moderately.

HUO Jianqi did some interesting films in this decade (at least IMO). I especially liked his Life Show (with its excellent lead performance by Hong Tao (there seems to be two actresses of the same age, and I'm not certain IMDB sorts their films out right. Very confusing).

A "fun film" by Xin Lee (or Lee Xin) about an attempt at ultra-low budget film making also stars one of these Hong Taos, plus Coco Lee and John Lone. Never found a subbed version, but we still found it quite entertaining.

Tommaso · #142 Post by **Tommaso** » Sun Dec 06, 2015 3:04 pm

Two films about prostitution:

Promised Land (Amos Gitai, 2004): this was one of the most impressive and uncomfortable films I've seen for quite some time. A group of Estonian girls are smuggled through the Egyptian desert into Israel, where they are to work as forced prostitutes. With a bare minimum of dialogue Gitai presents their plight in a disturbingly intense manner which, although there's very little actual violence or sex scenes, even reminded me obliquely of "Salo" in places. Brilliant handheld camerawork and a short appearance by Hanna Schygulla as the madam of the brothel, whose attempts to comfort one of the girls turns into an utterly bizarre scene. As usual with Gitai, a very political film with a very clear stance on the subject. Highly recommended.

Hardcore (Dennis Iliadis, 2004): The debut film of this Greek filmmaker, who apparently has now moved on to the US to direct some genre B-movies, which I haven't seen. But this one certainly isn't minor. The story of two young Greek prostitutes who fall in love with each other, extremely well played by the two actresses, and believably scripted. The film is certainly more explicit than the Gitai, but is certainly far removed from being exploitative and rather seems to have been influenced stylistically by the likes of Wong Kar-Wai. In spite of some logic holes, a very fine film.

And if after these somewhat demanding films you need something more meditative, here it is:

Il dono (Michelangelo Frammartino, 2003): Actually, if you've seen "Le quattro volte", you don't need to read this description, because the Italian director's debut film is very much in the same vein as its more famous successor. A village in Calabria, in which a young somewhat retarded girl is believed to be possessed by the people of the village. Nothing much happens, no dialogue, an air of melancholia and archaic beauty, but also of dull daily life. Perhaps even a tad more accessible than "Le quattro volte". Unfortunately still not available on dvd, not even in Italy I think, but if you have a chance to watch the recording of an Italian TV transmission, do so. If only because Frammartino is such a unique filmmaker.

TMDaines · #143 Post by **TMDaines** » Sun Dec 06, 2015 7:51 pm

I'm a sucker for some Schygulla so I'll give it a watch!

#144 Post by **domino harvey** » Mon Dec 07, 2015 10:34 am

Recent viewings:

Bad Santa (Terry Zwigoff 2003) I'm hardly a prude, but I assume this film has such an inflated cachet due to its incessant negativity and overabundance of swears and other vulgarities? Because it can't be because it's funny (though I know comedy is subjective...), right? I "get" what the film is doing, but I still don't care.

the Darwin Awards (Finn Taylor 2006) Cobbled together like a clip show for a wacky crime of the week detective show, this failed comedy puts Joseph Fiennes (Hollywood was still trying to make him happen?) and Winona Ryder together as insurance investigators piecing together claims inspired by the titular awards. Lots of C-list character actors pop up here and there, but the film, which annoyingly is shot in a faux-documentary fashion for most of the running time, is an unfunny failure.

Dude, Where's My Car? (Danny Leiner 2000) An admirably stupid film that doesn't pull punches on being offensive (It is literally impossible to picture this film getting made today) and tasteless in its silly "What happened last night?" narrative. I wouldn't blame anyone for hating this movie, but I thought it was surprisingly funny and dumb in equal measure, and, for what it is and aims to be, mostly a success.

Elf (Jon Favreau 2003) Though it gets progressively less funny as it soldiers on, this was a sweet enough Christmas movie that scores a handful of decent laughs, mostly from adopted elf Will Ferrell's early interactions with New York City. The sentimental ending and requisite change of heart from James Caan seems to come out of nowhere and is less than convincing. Also, Ferrell and Zooey Deschanel getting together at the end of the film calls to mind why few Jerry Lewis movies end with Lewis in a romantic relationship-- there's something unsettling about an infantile adult participating in these sort of endeavors

Gigantic (Matt Aselton 2009) Ebert's offhand comment about this movie's narrative resembling a job application (And then this could happen, and also this character does this crazy thing, &c) is spot-on, and it's hard to imagine anyone would hire anyone responsible for this mess to go anywhere near a movie set ever again. I've seen my share of disposably quirky indie flicks, but this is the worst yet. Devoid of any pleasures present in even the worst of films, characters don't so much interact as show up in the same scene together. The worst film I've seen for this project.

Hulk (Ang Lee 2003) The editing and direction is quite clever, and seems to place some importance on replicating the feel of reading a comic, not only in the use of actual panels within the frame, but the intercutting of several different angles/shots during scenes of long dialogue (to replicate panels where characters talk so much they need another box to contain it). Unfortunately, the story Ang Lee decided to direct in this fashion is garbage-- overlong, unsatisfying, and frequently embarrassing. I admittedly think the premise itself of the Hulk is laughable to begin with, but this film does it no favors.

In Bruges (Martin McDonagh 2008) In contrast to Bad Santa, here's a film just as cheekily offensive and featuring an equally unlikeable protagonist, but here the key difference is that this film is clever, funny, and has more going for it than being offensive. The foul-mouthed pleasures here are myriad, and the trio of central performances all land, especially Ralph Fiennes' baddie. Recommended.

Mr Magorium's Wonder Emporium (Zach Helm 2007) I know I'm not the audience for this, but I'm not sure kids give a shit about twenty-somethings who haven't reached their potential yet either, so at least I'm not alone in that designation. Forced whimsy and an awful perf by Dustin Hoffman make this one a hard slog to get through.

the Private Lives of Pippa Lee (Rebecca Miller 2009) One of those annoyingly eventful stories of a person's life that is too stuffed with quirky occurrences to sustain a traditional film narrative, and so we get a parade of colorful events split between Robin Wright Penn and Blake Lively as older and younger versions of the titular character. The Lively sections work better, but the film seems more enamored with the latter portions and its star. Against all odds I found myself somewhat sympathetic to the film as it wore on, and while the MOTW editing choices hobble the film to some degree, I have to admit I found this pleasingly watchable, in a Lifetime movie with swears sort of way.

Town & Country (Peter Chelsom 2001) One of the biggest flops of all time, the recently active Warren Beatty unofficially retired from acting after this one sank, and watching this bizarre and utterly unfunny infidelity comedy makes his shame real and understandable. It's hard to imagine an audience for this that isn't just your parents wandering the aisle at Blockbuster, but it comes about five to ten years too late and its stale stock of gay and minority jokes were likely never fresh.

Win a Date With Tad Hamilton! (Robert Luketic 2004) Finally, a romantic comedy for "friendzoned" "nice guys," this romantic comedy spends almost the entire running time making the "bad" suitor look charming and nice and the "good" suitor comes off as a whiny, entitled dick with no positive qualities. Kate Bosworth is the winner of the date with a movie star contest who must choose between the two, and she decides to go with Topher Grace over Josh Duhamel. Maybe in real life I could believe that, but in the world of the film, Grace comes off as that one friend you eventually stop inviting to things because he won't stop mocking everything.

#145 Post by **zedz** » Mon Dec 07, 2015 3:56 pm

domino harvey wrote:Recent viewings:

Bad Santa (Terry Zwigoff 2003) I'm hardly a prude, but I assume this film has such an inflated cachet due to its incessant negativity and overabundance of swears and other vulgarities? Because it can't be because it's funny (though I know comedy is subjective...), right? I "get" what the film is doing, but I still don't care.

We saw this when it came out with a decent festival crowd and found it really funny: well paced, well played, smartly scurrilous. So we decided to watch it on DVD with a friend a few years later and it sunk like a stone. I don't know if the edit was tinkered with for home video or if it just needed the context of a big audience (maybe we were really drunk that first time?), but the difference was stark. And we could see the bits of the film that had been hilarious the first time around clearly not working this time through, which made it all the more frustrating.

EDIT: Just checked, and there seem to be three different cuts of the film, with about ten minutes difference between them. Presumably that's part of the problem. The film we saw on DVD seemed very sluggish compared to the brisk original.

#146 Post by **swo17** » Mon Dec 07, 2015 4:03 pm

There's a theatrical version, a shorter director's cut that removes narration and changes the ending (among other things), and an extended unrated cut. I think I used to have an opinion about which one worked best (the theatrical?) but can no longer remember for sure. Perhaps this IMDb user's recommendation will be of assistance:

Whichever version has more boobs.

#147 Post by **domino harvey** » Mon Dec 07, 2015 4:08 pm

I watched the longer "Badder" Santa version (unrated with extra footage). I believe only it and the shorter, narration-free director's cut are on Blu-Ray, with the original theatrical cut out on DVD only

#148 Post by **swo17** » Mon Dec 07, 2015 4:28 pm

It must have been the director's cut I preferred then, because I remember it being put out on Blu-ray. Not that it would be likely to change your mind though. The film was of course also noteworthy for coming out right after John Ritter's untimely death.

#149 Post by **mfunk9786** » Mon Dec 07, 2015 4:43 pm

Very few things make me laugh harder than when the kid offers "Because you went to the bathroom on mommy's dishes?" as a possible explanation for Thornton getting beaten up.

#150 Post by **domino harvey** » Sat Dec 12, 2015 11:10 am

Hopefully the Baddest Santa cut will be the one that brings us all together

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