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Flowers of Shanghai is one of those films that (for me) gets better with each viewing. I t left me a bit cold on first DVD viewing (despite the admirable visuals), but I grew fonder on a couple of DVD re-watchings. And I was very impressed (and moved) when I finally saw this screened as part of the recent HHH retrospective.

Three disagreements unfortunately.

bamwc2 wrote:Flowers of Shanghai[/b] (Hsiao-Hsien Hou, 1998): Hou's film tells the story of the goings on at a late 19th century Chinese brothel, a place where patrons don't just have sex, but also gather to feast, play, and generally indulge in whatever sybaritic pleasure is available. Plot wise there is very little going on, just random vignettes of the behind the scenes machinations of the women who work there and the men who patronize the business. The film is visually gorgeous, but it ultimately strikes me as a minor entry into Hou's cannon. Lacking in focus, it just never connected for me.

Thoroughly disagree on this one as for me it's Hou's most refined and greatest accomplishment. But it's all a matter of what you're looking for and what you want or need from a piece like this. For me what matters is the mathematical precision of the set pieces, the movement of the camera as a thing unto itself dispensing the means of meditative insight, the mood, tone and texture. It's all about the accumulation of detail in a hypnotically subdued, almost subconscious sort of way and all under the surface of the greatest of beauty.

Nowhere (Gregg Araki, 1997): I've yet to see a good film from Gregg Araki aside from Mysterious Skin. For whatever reason this entry from him came highly recommended. Don't be fooled. It's a largely unwatchable fairy tale of the last days on Earth before an apocalyptic alien lizard invasion is set to turn everyone into giant bugs. The main character, played by James Duval, is an unlikable moron, and Araki's "vision" is nothing short of a hyper kinetic mess.

Love this movie but will admit that to be able to enjoy or appreciate most of Araki's body of work is a very specific matter of taste (I find this movie funny as hell for instance but I don't know how I could convince someone else that it is). I won't deny that part of it but as with all of his work, a lot of pain and deep vulnerability lies beneath the aggressive and ostentatious surface. It may be less clear here than in The Doom Generation (his masterpiece as far as I'm concerned) but it is there and it informs everything else; it's what gives weight and depth to everything else. Araki's ramped up and willfully glib teen irony does attempt to deflect or evade the implications of that but it can never completely escape it. Because you're right, without that it would all just be fatuous noise (although still pretty damn funny to me).

Simple Men (Hal Hartley, 1992): Another Harlty vehicle, but one that I enjoyed a little less than the previously discussed Amateur. This time we find brothers Bill and Dennis McCabe searching for their radical fugitive father who has been on the run first over twenty year since being accused of bombing a government building. Neither man knows the father, but they go on the quest for different reasons. Bill (Robert John Burke) is himself a fugitive trying to lay low after a robbery. Dennis (Bill Sage), the younger of the two, is a naive idealist searching for the man both for answers and because he sees it as the right thing to do. Well, folks, this film is quirky as Hell (see the reoccurring joke of the traveling Mary medallion, or don't. It doesn't really matter). The dialogue is still clunky all around. I'm not sure if there's been an auteur as tone deaf at capturing the way that people speak since George Lucas. There are some entertaining moments, but, no, I can't recommend it.

I'll confess first off that I'm still a huge fan of early 90's Hartley. I grew up with that model Hartley and shared those films amongst friends at school during a very formative period so I can't claim much impartiality. I have little tolerance, meanwhile, with post-Henry Fool Hartley for whatever reason. Having said all that I can't tell what your main issue with this film is. I don't think that Hartley is all that interested in "capturing the way that people speak" according to some sort of standard gauge of naturalist realism. It's no more or less stylized than the dialogue style of many auteurs (Egoyan here also comes immediately to mind) and is tuned specifically for the range of tonalities he's trying to reach. Again it may be in part just a matter of what you personally respond to or enjoy. I certainly still find the film very funny but that doesn't give enough due to its other successful aspects especially the exceptionally moving and delicate finale which is earned and achieved primarily because of Hartley's overall restraint.

Once you begin to see/feel beyond the elegant and beautiful surface of Flowers of Shanghai, there is a great deal of feeling and emotion. So, while its formal beauty is impressive, I didn't begin to love this until I was able to perceive this other psychological/dramatic layer.

Mainland China in the 1990s (Part 1)

The Fifth Generation
What is the Fifth Generation? Technically, it refers to the first set of graduates from the Beijing Film Academy in 1982 (as opposed to the Fourth Generation, who graduated before the Cultural Revolution shut down the school and whose careers were then sidelined), but it’s now commonly used to refer to all the Chinese filmmakers who got started in the 80s before Tiananmen. Handily, they also share a lot of themes, namely an interest in China’s rural pre/proto-Communist past, a taste for “real” stories mixed with pageantry, and in some critics' eyes, a tendency to self-orientalize.

Unfortunately, besides the big 3 (Zhang, Chen, Tian), most of the others ended up in a mix of television, commercial film, and government programmers and have never found much recognition abroad. What major works they did produce are hard to find. So note that this guide is not complete, and I’ll try to note where the gaps are (and feel free to help fill them in!).

Zhang Yimou
Judou (1990) Perhaps Zhang’s most prototypical film of this early era: a rural melodrama infused with strong colors and earthy sexuality. These aspects are well bolstered by the dye factory setting and Gong Li. Gong Li is the young wife of the dye maker, a cruel old man who just wants a son out of her (but who thinks the process involves buying fertility lanterns, sitting on his wife, and beating her with a stick). She and the old man’s nephew fall in love and carry on a passionate affair until a child is born. They enjoy a brief period of happiness as a family. Then the two are then forced apart, at first by the old man’s suspicions, then by social protocol, and finally by their own son. While Zhang is never particularly political, you can read this brief period of sexual freedom as the gap between the stifling Confucianism of the 19th century and the puritanical Marxism of the mid-20th. The heightened colors complement the passion and speak in lieu of the deeper, frustrated emotions that can’t be acted upon. Overall, a pretty great entry point into Zhang’s oeuvre.
R1 OOP- Pioneer or Razor NOTE: The dvdbeaver review shows some awful cropped shots from the Razor DVD, but I own a copy and it looks like the Pioneer. I assume Razor is a sketchjob that at some point replaced their DVD with one that copied the Pioneer transfer, but figuring out what’s a good release and what’s a bad one will be a crapshoot, so the Pioneer may be safer. It would nice if someone would just release a decent Bluray instead.

Raise the Red Lantern (Da hong deng long gao gao gua, 1991) If Judou belongs to the genre of erotic/aesthetic world cinema, then Raise the Red Lantern is its intellectual art film cousin. The color pallet is less vibrant, dominated by red, including the red lanterns of the title, the garments, and the décor of her room. Gong Li returns as a young student who’s forced to become the 4th wife in a wealthy household. Inside, Gong struggles for favor with the other wives until they begin to sympathize with each other’s plights. Over all hangs the invisible figure of the husband, never seen in frame. The not-so-subtle critique of Confucian patriarchy is balanced by dynamic relationships between the women.
R1 MGM World Films (OOP- This will be a theme)

The Story of Qiu Ju (Qiu Ju da guansi) 1992) Zhang radically shifts to a new neorealist/documentary style here, and Gong Li’s performance follows suit. Gong is a pregnant peasant woman whose husband gets kicked in the balls by the village chief. Gong wants an apology from the chief, who offers money but refuses to apologize. She takes her case to various levels of government, eventually becoming one of the first people to file a suit against a government official under new a policy (the title literally translates as “Qiu Ju Goes to Court”). Gong gives a remarkable performance, hiding under the scarves and heavy padded coats of rural Northern China, her mouth always hanging slightly open. Zhang used hidden cameras to film several scenes in towns and villages, and Gong blends in without notice. At its worst bits, the film comes close to resembling propaganda for new government policy, but Zhang creates a vivid portrayal of rural life coming ever closer to modern urbanity, populated by people who express petty rage, neighborly affection, and stubborn obstinacy seemingly all at the same time.
R1 Sony (OOP)

To Live (Huozhe, 1994) Zhang’s big epic of 20th century China, spanning from the 1940s to the 1980s. Ge You (better known in China as a comic actor) is a degenerate gambler who loses his family house. He sets off working as a traveling entertainer, reuniting with his wife (Gong Li) and children. The family survives the Chinese Civil War, the rise of communism, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution, though not without loss and hardship. Alternately comic and tragic, this may be Zhang’s most accessible film (though some knowledge of Chinese history is necessary), and arguably his most openly political. All 3 of the major 5th generation directors made a piece of “scar literature” about the suffering of the 50s-60s, but each feels very different. This is for better or worse the melodrama of the bunch, but its effective, and I like it a great deal.
R1 MGM World Films (OOP)

Shanghai Triad (Yao a yao, yaodao waipo qiao, 1995) A gangster story in 1920s Shanghai. An adolescent boy comes to join his uncle in Shanghai working for a Triad boss. After a dispute between rival gangs, he’s sent to an island hideaway to serve the boss’s mistress, Jinbao (Gong Li), a cabaret singer who has been having an affair with the boss’s Number Two man. This plays out a bit like Raise the Red Lantern, but from a young boy’s point of view. The films begins by alienating us from Gong’s character (she seems spoiled, haughty, even reckless with her affair) but then draws us to sympathize with her as we realize how she has been forced into this position and is struggling to somehow free herself. There’s also a musical number. The film drags a bit in places, and the beginning sets up a lot of stuff that ends up not being important, but this is still an enjoyable film, if not my favorite.
R1 (OOP) , RA Hong Kong Blu (quality unknown)

Keep Cool (You hua haohao shuo, 1997) An anomaly in Zhang’s career, this kinetic urban comedy is funny at times, grating at others. It hasn’t been released by anyone in the US or UK, possibly because it was pulled from Cannes by the Chinese government and thus never got the exposure of Zhang’s other films. It’s also, as a comedy, far more inclined toward the domestic Chinese market; urban comedies were a big trend at the time, after Feng Xiaogang’s success with Party A, Party B showed that Chinese films could compete domestically against Hollywood imports. I saw it on a Chinese disc, and while I speak Chinese fairly well, it was still a challenge to break through the rapid pun-filled dialogue (which admittedly may negatively color my review). The film’s opening moments are its best, as Jiang Wen (with awful haircut) chases his ex-girlfriend across town and various transportation vehicles as Chinese rock blasts over the soundtrack. After some more failed courting (including getting a sidewalk peddler played by Zhang himself to shout love poetry outside the girl’s apartment complex), the girl hooks up with a gangster, who has Jiang beaten up. Jiang falls on the laptop of a bystander and breaks it, and is then hounded by the man’s demands for a replacement. The last half of the film is mostly Jiang and the bystander waiting for the gangster in a karaoke restaurant—Jiang wants to attack the guy and the bystander cycles through increasingly desperate ways to get him to reconsider. Contains one really great karaoke scene, and one tonally-awkward ending (supposedly imposed by censors). Zhang pounds heavily on the style button here, and the film is all handheld camera work, quick pans, lens flares, and jump cuts. I found it great in small doses (see the opening) but a headache over the long run, and I think Zhang’s contemporaries (like Feng) outdid him in this genre.
DVD: There was once a Spanish-subbed disc, but I don’t think I’ve even seen English subs on any back channels. Learn Chinese or make up your own dialogue.

Not One Less (Yige dou be neng shao 1999) And we’re back to the neo-realist style of Qiu Ju, but without Gong Li. Instead we’ve got a 13 year-old girl showing up as substitute teacher at a country school, where the poor teacher obviously hasn’t had a vacation in years. Being 13, she’s a pretty awful teacher, but she is dedicated to her students and wants all of them to stay in school, even if that means abandoning the class to bring back one pupil who’s gotten lost trying to find work in the city (and also because the teacher offered her a bonus if all the students were still there when he came back). What follows is actually a pretty well-balanced look at the urban-rural divide in 90s China, with the city portrayed as industrious but unsympathetic to rural outsiders (versus a terrifying hell-maw threatening suburban brats, see Chris Columbus). Zhang manages to sprinkle in humor, sentimentality, rural blight, and urban alienation without spoiling the dish. So what could have been a mawkish inspirational story of teacher’s devotion is tempered by a light and documentarian touch.
R1/R2 Sony (OOP)

The Road Home (Wode Fuqin Muqin, 1999) Zhang returns to bold and less natural manipulation of colors in this romantic drama. In some ways, it’s a clear forbearer of the extreme colorplay to come in Hero. In the black-and-white present day, a son returns home to bury his father and console his distraught mother in a framing device that directly references Titanic. The son begins to narrate the story of how his parents met, which involves beautiful command of seasonal colors, a bright red coat, and loooooooooots of close-ups ogling Zhang Ziyi’s face. Your enjoyment of this will be directly related to how much you enjoy Zhang Ziyi looking coquettishly askew at the camera or watching her run awkwardly through the fields, arms hanging limp at her sides. For me, the intense focus on Zhang’s face is a serious flaw, since this story is ostensibly from her point of view (since the father is dead, and the son’s narration focuses around her), but Zhang makes the mistake of filming her and not her point of view. There are maybe 10 secs of “female gaze” and the rest is shots of Zhang running or grinning. Overall, it ain’t bad, but it’s saccharine and is far more concerned with its protagonist’s face than her thoughts.
R1/R2 Sony (OOP)

Chen Kaige
Life on a String (Bian zou bian chang, 1990) My favorite Chen film of the decade, closer to the quiet, tragic beauty of Yellow Earth than the excesses of the later films. This, like Temptress Moon, is hard to follow at first, and assumes some knowledge of Chinese tradition and folklore. There’s also an odd restaurant surrounded by waterfalls that may or not be some metaphysical waystation between this world and the next. The plot follows an old blind musician who wanders around rural northern China, regarded as a holy man by the locals. According to some custom, if a blind musician breaks 1000 strings during his lifetime, he will be able to regain his sight. The old man has a young protégée, who occasionally rages at his blindness and wants to see. The young man falls in love with a local girl, but trouble arises with her parents. Gradually, it’s revealed that while the old man has tried to put love and the desire to see behind him, he still feels tormented by lost love and the promise that his eyesight may return, causing conflict with the young man. Throughout a mysterious figure, who resembles a statue of a God of Death in the temple where the two live, appears in crowds watching the players perform, grinning mysteriously. While the colors don’t pop as much as in Yellow Earth, there are still lots of lovely landscape shots. Appreciation of this film may depend a lot on what you make of the two big sequences where the old man sings (to stop a fight between two villages, and at the end), and your ability to accept its many ellipses that are never quite filled.
R1 Kino

Farewell, My Concubine (Chu Wang Bie Ji, 1992) The so-far only Chinese film to take the top prize at Cannes, and one of many Chinese films seemingly responding to The Last Emperor. Like To Live, it could be considered a scar film about the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, but reaches back further into the 1920s to tell the tale of two opera performers growing from harsh apprenticeship to star performers to unwanted relics. If Zhang’s film is the melodramatic version of this tale, this is the operatic, and not just in its setting. Everything is heightened—colors, costumes, emotions, a leading to an elevated sense of tragedy. Beautiful and packed with a smorgasbord of serious themes: adversity in art, devotion to art vs love, homosexuality, the performance of gender, traditional culture struggling to stay alive within Communist China. There is lots to unpack, but dramatically the film get tiresome. Much of the plot is driven by the central love triangle, where Dieyi (Leslie Cheung) loves his stage-partner Xiaolou (Zhang Fengyi), who loves the former prostitute Juxian (Gong Li, in by far her best performance for Chen, having been given a role that suits her). Each performance is strong, particularly Cheung’s sexual confusion and diva habits, but every section of the film repeats the same basic pattern: Cheung and Zhang reunite to play together, jealousy between Cheung and Gong intercedes, Zhang makes a prideful boast and causes trouble, Juxian cleans up and pulls Zhang back to her, Cheung feels alienated and self-destructs, Zhang comes back to help him, a misunderstanding or incident separates them again, repeat. The endless cycle of petty grudges and stupid obstinancy makes it hard for me to really feel for the characters (a courtroom scene in which Cheung tries to sabotage others ’efforts to save him from execution made me roll my eyes rather than weep), but your mileage may vary. 20+ years after Farewell’s big win, there’s a sense of a once-exotic surface falling away to more clearly reveal the film’s flaws, but this is still a major film of the Fifth Generation, and well worth watching.
R1 Miramax, RABC Blu Korea (quality unknown)

Temptress Moon (Feng Yue, 1996) - An ambitious trainwreck, with some fantastic cinematography and a few good ideas lost in a big muddle. There are many problems here—the film is way too long, the plot keeps tripping over itself, the first 20-30 minutes hit without making much sense, and Gong Li is woefully miscast (she apparently came in as a replacement after filming had begun) as a withdrawn, naïve woman who becomes the head of a major family, crumbling due to decadence and opium. Leslie Cheung is a con-man who pretends to be a gigolo in order to extort older married women, and who was also once a servant in Gong’s household, where he poisoned her father by putting arsenic in his opium. He returns to try and woo Gong away to where she can be kidnapped and ransomed, but finds himself torn by his feelings for her, hatred toward the household, self-loathing, and desire for a return to innocence. This is all very complicated, and the movie does its best to make it even harder to follow. Still, Christopher Doyle’s vibrantly colored and kinetic cinematography, plus Cheung’s bitter romantic, make it feel a bit like a lost Wong Kar-wai joint. There are some fantastic scenes: a long handhold shot of Gong following Cheung through the gardens and house, a montage of Cheung’s conquests ending with him handing a rose to a poor young country girl, Cheung being forced to confront one of his older lovers. But the film as a whole is a mess with far too many characters and subplots (wait, that’s Cheung’s sister?), and while Gong Li is a great actress, she subdues herself so much to play this naïve girl that she’s almost boring to watch, and it’s hard to connect her with the feisty tomboy running around in flashbacks. There’s a great deal about opium in this movie, but truth-be-told, it feels far more like the hyperactice fiasco of a “cocaine movie” (having never done either of these drugs, I’m assuming that Flowers of Shanghai is the apotheosis of an opium movie). I can’t quite recommend the film (though I can recommend some of the above scenes), but fans of Wong/Doyle/Cheung should find something to love.
R1 Miramax (OOP)

The Emperor and the Assassin (Jing Ke Ci Qin Wang, 1998) Chen’s entry in the end-of-century re-evaluation of Qin Shi Huang (the first emperor of China). Historically demonized by Confucian scholars (a philosophy that Qin did not believe in) as a cruel, bloodthirsty despot, the 20th century saw a lot of recasting the Qin emperor as a tragic figure or a political necessity (see Hero). Chen follows the tragic path, showing an peace-loving young king forced into violent and unforgiving warfare by a mix of ambition and violent resistance to his goals of unity. Chen finds a parallel in one of the assassins who tried to kill the Qin king, Jing Ke, a man who unthinkingly killed many until killing the family of a blacksmith, including their blind daughter. Wracked with guilt, Jing Ke gives up his trade, while Qin pushes himself through remorse for terrible crimes, alienating many of those closest to him. Gong Li stars as Lady Zhao, a Qin concubine who moves from an idealist who believes in Qin’s plans for unity to resenting him for his violent methods. She links the two men. Unfortunately it’s an underwritten part, serving mainly to serve the plot and provide an audience surrogate who turns against Qin. This film is, again, far too long and heavy on subplots (Chen himself appears as a minister with a pivotal role, but with a 90 minute gap in his screen time, making the character easy to forget), and a few remarkable set pieces are lost in the brown/beige muddle of its historical set design. It does however, have a great final shot.
R1/R2 Sony (OOP)

Tian Zhuangzhuang
Li Lianying: The Imperial Eunuch (Da taijian Li Lianying, 1991) - Like Tian’s masterpiece below, this is an attempt to approach Chinese history from a personal viewpoint, but this feels like a work for hire. It is a relatively early attempt to rehabilitate the historical reputations of Empress Cixi and her aide, the eunuch Li Lianying (Jiang Wen), who are usually depicted as selfish and corrupt, and the key instigators of China’s 19th century troubles. Taking Li’s point of view, the film skips over most of the corruption and instead paints him as fiercely loyal to the empress, who in turn is merely trying to do what she thinks best for the country (i.e. there’s a scene where Li asks an admiral to give back the funds allocated to the navy to the throne, skipping that these were used to construct a marble boat in the summer palace). Li’s devotion has a romantic element, but being a eunuch he is unable to act upon it. Unfotunately, none of these themes are particularly strong, and the film as a whole has a weird empty feeling, as if they couldn’t get the extras to fill out the shooting locations. It’s sleepy and feels like a TV movie, where even promising scenes get pulled out into clichés. The high point is a scene where the empress has a group of servants dancing to a western waltz.
R0 Chinese Films

The Blue Kite (Lan Fengzheng, 1993) Easily my favorite of the big 3’s Cultural Revolution scar films, Tian’s personal epic avoids most of the melodrama of its cousins, creating a quietly moving study of a courtyard neighborhood transforming in step with China’s history. This is essentially Boyhood, only filmed on a regular schedule and set during the tumultuous first two decades of the People’s Republic. While he doesn’t have the popping colors of Zhang or Chen, Tian carefully controls the color scheme to develop over time, favoring certain shades during each chapter. What we get is a relatively unflashy film deeply concerned about all its characters, with adult understanding clashing with the myopia of childhood. It also largely avoids the exoticism of the other films, telling its story on more universally human terms.
R1 Kino

Zhou Xiaowen
Ermo (1994)- Zhou shares Zhang’s interest in sexuality and rural life, but has a darker sense of humor. This is an underseen masterpiece, apparently never released on a DVD with English subs (though there are laserdisc rips floating around). Ermo is a rural woman who has a fierce rivalry with her neighbor. The neighbor gets a TV, so Ermo decides that they must a TV too, but a bigger one. To raise the money, Ermo begins making noodles at night, eventually traveling into the city to sell them. She also starts an affair with her neighbor’s husband, who makes frequent trips into the city. Zhou’s tone is at once serious and satirical, sighing over changing values in Chinese society as it mocks them. It’s also relatively light on policing adultery, and Zhou films the noodle-making scenes with a sensuality not unlike sex scenes. While Zhang’s rural films are mixed with nostalgia and criticism of the past, this film takes a darkly comic look at their modern descendants. If you can find it, well worth a look.
Laserdisc

The Emperor’s Shadow (Qin Song, 1996) Another film about Qin Shi Huang, this one with Zhou’s comic/serious tone, and again finding some odd places to put some sex scene montages involving cannons and gates crashing (this is also a film were a paraplegic learns to walk again after having sex). Unfortunately, the combination of comic farce and somber historical drama doesn’t always mesh well, even though it takes many liberties with history to make it work. Ge You (the hapless hero of To Live and the gay aesthete collaborator of Farewell My Concubine) plays toward his sillier side as Gao Jianli, a famed musician and childhood friend of kind of Qin, Ying Zheng (Jiang Wen). Grown up, Ying Zheng has Gao brought to him, hoping that he will compose a powerful anthem to win support for his new country. Jiang plays the emperor as a power-hungry maniac, loyal only to his daughter (in a light satirical touch, he doesn’t care much for his fat and spoiled son, who will become his short-lived successor). This is all clearly an allegory for the relationship between authoritarian states and artists. That theme and the film’s often irreverent tone are by far the most notable things about this film, which again drags on for far too long, with the relationship between Ying and Gao turning into an endless series of push-pull.
R1 Fox Lorber

NEXT: The Sixth Generation (I may also try to add some other prominent 5th Generation directors like Huang Jianxin, if I can find more of their work. Please point me in the right direction if you know of anything else you’d like to see added to these guides)

La Promesse
I honestly don't know if anything needs to be said beyond it is as great as all of the other Dardennes features and in roughly the same way. That said I think it does capture something that has been missing from their other movies that I've seen. Namely it is supremely casual during its first hour ignoring any central conflict that their films usually take up instead investing in stuff like the painting of his teeth scene. There's really nothing comparable to Rosetta's income or The Child's sold baby. Stuff just happens as life with events casually coming and going and no necessary end point being developed. Even when something seemingly big happens like the immigrant dying it doesn't connect to any big picture of the film. It's just how things are and can be glossed over by the characters if need be. The stuff with the prostitution works well enough, but it is also a different vibe that they didn't need to go to to make the film great. That's a minor complaint, if at all a real one, though.

Dance Me Outside
This is a mostly anonymous effort from McDonald more in line with producer Norman Jewison's work. That said it is admirably anonymous effort more interesting than most such examples with at least a little bit of McDonald's humour and love of music invading the story. I'm sure there's an argument to be made for the film's social importance as the story does a good job of painting the characters as ordinary without forgetting how society at large handles Native Americans. While it is good to think of that considering the popularity of the below and similar films from the same era such an argument doesn't seem compelling for the film as a film.

Last of the Mohicans
This is a pretty middling film and I far prefer the silent version of it, but there's still a lot to love. particularly the score and look of the film is just wonderful to eat up. The main problem for me is that a simple sort of characterization which rings beautiful in silence is a bit empty through dialogue. The film seems like it is concerned with the motivations of presentation and siding that the characters are doing, but doesn't provide enough character for that to feel relevant leaving a kind of empty sense to it all. Not a bad film, Wes Studi alone makes it worth it, but not great either.

Safe
Who would have thought that getting a perm could be so horrifying? The film might be a little too Antonioni dependent, but in terms of tone alone whatever debt may be present is totally irrelevant. It's the first film where I've really understood the suburban nightmare. I'm not sure if I get the AIDS thing everyone brings up with regards to the movie as the illness seems more a social disease like an anxiety, but perhaps I'm being dense. Also to steal a turn of phrase Moore burns a hole through the screen.

Consenting Adults
I have to wonder how much of the 2015 baggage I have watching this would be present for the original 1992 audiences. The film achieves a weirdness early on, but where it's leading to is deliberately kept in the quiet and works that with genius. With Pakula directing the smell of a thriller is always there, but it's with Kevin Spacey's great support that the question of time comes into play. He hadn't quite played a serial killer yet, but there are certainly a lot of strange characters already on the resume so the possibilities that my associations of him as the 'villain' were the associations at the time bug me to no end. That said his Richard Widmark style fatale is just one component that makes this a surprisingly great film, only a couple of steps below Pakula's '70s work. It's an absolutely loony film that seems to get the most glee in acting out as an ordinary surface with just the grossest interior. Not just Spacey propositioning swapping wives, but Kline getting totally hyped up in his brain as he deals the with mundane parts of his life. It's a more down to earth Lynch reality. Which all makes the film sound a lot better then it probably is. The film suffers from a lot of bad '90s thriller tropes and a very weird reapplication of noir ones, but that's the benefit of low expectations I suppose.

Thanks Shrew for your Fifth Generation guide. Three of those films made my top ten last time (Raise the Red Lantern, Farewell, My Concubine and Temptress Moon). It's Taiwan where my gaps are, so I'll concentrate here more.

knives wrote:Safe
Who would have thought that getting a perm could be so horrifying? The film might be a little too Antonioni dependent, but in terms of tone alone whatever debt may be present is totally irrelevant. It's the first film where I've really understood the suburban nightmare. I'm not sure if I get the AIDS thing everyone brings u with regards to the movie as the illness seems more a social disease like an anxiety, but perhaps I'm being dense. Also to steal a turn of phrase Moore burns a hole through the screen.

I believe Haynes goes into the AIDS metaphor issue in the extras on the Criterion disc. It's more of an unavoidable association from the time, with Haynes emerging from the New Queer Cinema and following on from a film dealing in overt AIDS metaphors. Any 'mystery disease' film by a gay filmmaker in the 80s and 90s couldn't really avoid those resonances. Haynes was not interested in exploring that particular metaphor in depth, but he did acknowledge (and possibly welcome) the resonances and complications that it introduced as both a parallel and a contrast (for instance, Safe plays around with the "is it even actually a real physical disease?" ambiguity in a profitably provocative way, which is something that has no relevance to AIDS). I also believe that the dodgy 'positive thinking' cure explored at the end of the film was something that was actually - and outrageously - seriously proposed as an AIDS treatment at the time.

zedz wrote:Any 'mystery disease' film by a gay filmmaker in the 80s and 90s couldn't really avoid those resonances.

Or heterosexual filmmaker. See: Cronenberg's The Fly.

Flowers of Shanghai - Rewatched this for the first time since its original release (kept hoping for an incandescent BluRay; had to settle for the indifferent DVD). Because Hou's cinematic syntax is so different from the mainstream (long, slow takes; dearth of close-ups), the range of his style tends to get overlooked, but this is a film that's visually quite distinct from anything else he ever did. Every shot is languorous and opiated, with a drifting camera nodding in and out of consciousness: every single shot begins with a fade in from black and ends with a fade out, even when action between them is continuous, and more than that, the fades to and from black seem to be orchestrated on the set, not in post-production, as the onscreen light sources (candles and lanterns) are the first to appear and last to vanish in the gloom - a beautiful effect derived from Welles. It's also entirely confined to opulent interiors, with characters almost always in medium shot. In the world of this film, the kinetic travelling shots of Goodbye, South, Goodbye (my favourite of Hou's 90s films) are as unthinkable as its extreme long-shots. Of course, these aesthetic choices are absolutely appropriate for a film that's all about social confinement and mannered, moderated intimacy.

Hou's narrative obliqueness is also strongly in evidence, though in a different manner than most of his films. The film is quite talky, and most of the talk is gossip. And that gossip is where the action takes place. In a world in which women are obliged to be preoccupied about their social standing but are largely excluded from social interaction and discourse, gossip is their lifeblood, and reputations and self-respect stand or fall on what their more socially mobile acquaintances (the men) are saying about people the women may never have met. When major plot actions finally do occur on screen in the final act, it's quite shocking, but not really any less shocking than when what we assume to be the film's major plot thread (Master Wang's relationships with Crimson and Jasmin) is wrapped up in an aside between two other characters.

It's an impeccable, beautiful and hypnotic film, and I just adored the completely anachronistic music (it sounded like harmonium and strings, and in the second half of the film a lone drum joins them - if Nico had recorded a particularly chilled-out album for ECM in the 70s it might have sounded like this). My second-favourite Hou film of the 90s, so it's a likely inclusion on my final list.

And a heads up that a Complete Priit Parn 2DVD set is available in France. Parn is a master animator from Estonia, specializing in long-ish-form psychedelic surrealism, and the 1992 Hotel E is arguably his greatest work, and a likely contender for my list, even if I still have no real idea what's going on for much of it after all these years. 1995's 1895 is a hilarious mock-biography comprising a ludicrous daisy-chain of historic celebrity non-sequiturs, and 1998's Night of the Carrots is just half an hour of unforgettable WTF. The helpful imdb synopsis should give you a flavour of what you're in for with these films:
Diego the bicyclist waits to check into the PGI hotel, where each room's inhabitant seems more bizarre than the last, and the rabbits on the top floor have discovered the secret of voodoo, using electronics and carrots. Can the rare and unpredictable night of the carrots save everyone, or will their connections to the room's electrical sockets restrain them too much? Will Diego find love with an egg that speaks incessantly in German? Will the cellist, who is actually a room full of a gelatinous substance, affected in some way by buttons labeled K, G, and B, have dreams that explain everything? Or will the audience just leave scratching their heads? Not all questions get answered.

Mr Sausage wrote:

zedz wrote:Any 'mystery disease' film by a gay filmmaker in the 80s and 90s couldn't really avoid those resonances.

Or heterosexual filmmaker. See: Cronenberg's The Fly.

Given the films he'd made up to that point, I think Cronenberg qualified as 'honorary queer'.

Huh? How so? His films seem absolutely devoid of homosexual subtext and his ties to writers and filmmakers past doesn't really lean toward queer art though naturally there are queer artists in there.

knives wrote:Huh? How so? His films seem absolutely devoid of homosexual subtext and his ties to writers and filmmakers past doesn't really lean toward queer art though naturally there are queer artists in there.

I would suggest you watch the "plugging in" sequence in eXistenZ again.

If you consider 'queer' in its expanded 80s/90s sense of 'non-heteronormative', then you can see evidence of this all over Cronenberg's films, what with their paraphilias, alternative sexualities, squishy interpenetrations and gender subversion.

That seems a bit excessively broad, no? Though by that definition you are definitely correct.

Cute and snarky, but missing everything I said. His character are queer, there's no doubt about that. Through all of his career Cronenberg has explored sexuality in queer presentations, but the texture of how he explored it was not queer. To be more blunt I mean to say that having queer characters does not equate to having queer artistry and exploration of their queerness. It's how we can have Brokeback Mountain, a film exploring queer characters, not be queer in itself. At least until Crash I don't see any example where the queerness is equated to Cronenberg in the fashion that Genet or going back to the start of this Haynes does. Haynes' films are surprisingly small on actual sex yet unmistakably part of the evolution of queer art since Whitman and Wilde (probably before but that's irrelevant) which is something of an inverse of Cronenberg who is big on sex but small on those queer tones (mentally I've always stuck him with Kafka, Dostoevsky etc). I was conceding to Zedz on the basis of queer actions, but not necessarily on the basis of queer art.

I found sex to be an important theme of Safe in the first (pre-Wrenwood) portion of the film. And then its absence is notable in the second part, as Wrenwood is shown to be a place where men and women eat meals separately and are asked to practice "restraint in sexual interaction," whatever that means (presumably only sex between married couples). And though Carol's partner in the cooking activity is clearly attracted to her, the platonic context allows her to let down her guard and form a friendship, which was an obstacle for her character.
In flagrante sex scenes also have a crucial place in Far from Heaven and Mildred Pierce.

I'm actually baffled by how often AIDS comes up in relation to Safe. There are just too many huge differences between communicable disease such as HIV/AIDS (which wasn't really much of a "mystery disease" by the '90s) and environmental illness or whatever it is Carol suffers from. As zedz suggests, it's likely because Haynes is gay, and the mainstream still associated AIDS with homosexuality to some degree even in the mid-90s, unfortunately.

I think even in Far From Heaven (haven't seen Mildred Pierce) the sex itself is onscreen minimized a bit like the violence in Psycho. The idea of sex, queerness, so on and so forth and what it means for relationships and like strike me as more important then the actual acts.

Oh, and the Cronenberg/disease part of the discussion got me thinking, so I might as well post this, even though it feels like too much of a tangent:
Cronenberg has repeatedly been called the "king of venereal horror," and while it's hard to propose another candidate for that title, I'd argue that it'd be an error to think of it as mainly his domain. I think there are interesting connections between diseases like HIV/AIDS and the entire vampire genre of horror going all the way back to Dracula. And by "diseases like HIV/AIDS" I mainly mean syphilis, which was of course sexually transmitted, very common in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, to the point that there were deep fears of a huge epidemic of it at the time and was incurable during the entire time the vampire subgenre of horror established itself in popular culture. In addition to the connections between the eroticism of vampire lore and the sexual transmission of syphilis, there have also been associations between hereditary syphilis and having pointed vampire-like teeth. It's controversial to claim that Stoker himself died of the disease, but I'd be surprised if syphilis wasn't somewhere in his mind when he wrote Dracula.

To bring the gender dimension into this, the word "vamp" is of course derived from "vampire," and the trope of the femme fatale (or "toxic" female sexuality) could also be traced to the same fears of syphilis, linking loose sexuality to contagion—predominantly blaming women and in particular placing responsibility for the scourge of prostitution upon the prostitutes.

I think Cronenberg's major contribution to the subject is to treat disease not as a degenerative invasion, but as something with a purpose, something that transforms and recreates. Disease creates new creatures and, in some cases (eg. Shivers, The Fly), reveals the arbitrary nature of what we consider to be essential to our make-up.

It also seems to think of the disease as a way to heal sometimes. Especially in Shivers, but even recently like with the psychological diseases in Dangerous Method whatever harm they give they also provide a way for experiencing life that wouldn't be possible otherwise and that experience seems a sort he prefers. To go back to the '90s and queer text it's fascinating how he applies the same mentality to disease to more generalized sexuality over the decade. Naked Lunch and M. Butterfly deal at least in part with how honesty, dishonesty, and action in regards to sexuality with the possibility of disease whether AIDS or some social stigma being an essential part to the characters opening up. Irons seems doomed mostly as a result of his mind's inability to comprehend his own organs' desire and the organs of his love while Naked Lunched has that shocking scene in the birdcage with Kiki.

I would probably argue a bit away from an idea of Cronenberg having any particular affinity or interest in homosexual themes or characters in his films per se, or those themes in and of themselves (If anything I'd perhaps argue that his films have more to say about BDSM than vanilla straight-or-gay notions, though even that is not really where the main interest appears to lie). In a way I find that can sometimes be the reason for certain off-key notes in M Butterfly or Naked Lunch, when homosexuality has to explicitly come up as a theme. Even in Crash I think the homosexual encounters play just as blandly as anything else, even as rather de rigueur for our characters in the new setting in which they find themselves. Though that works in favour of the film as the sexual interest has moved elsewhere, broadened out even to become "polymorphously perverse". But I don't really see too many of the characters being comfortable in defining themselves with a 'sexual identity' until the very end of a Cronenberg work. Once the carapace of sexuality has hardened into an 'identity', that is kind of a death in itself. Especially in the later films, although something like Shivers sees it as a kind of (albeit scarily enforced) liberation in its 'free love' theme! Though 'free love' is ironically the binding 'identity' there, I suppose!

Though I do agree on the wider point. Sexual activity in Cronenberg's films seems less important than the way sexuality is ambiguous and fluid with often the fantastical premises allowing the characters to explore different sexual 'roles' (even something mainstream like like Scanners has that 'scanning orgy' sequence of the characters losing themselves in each other's minds). Even further than just a sense of ambiguous sexuality though, I get the feeling that a Cronenberg film is more preoccupied with sexuality getting abstracted completely out of the realm of conventional sexual activity altogether. The use of technology, mutation or disease is key here. The scary liberation of entirely new forms of behaviour which then are inevitably having the basic human drives of sex layered into it. So the hallucinations in Videodrome take the form of getting whipped (or being the one wielding the whip) on a TV show, or a controlling rape is abstracted into the vaginal opening getting a pre-programmed videotape pushed into it, and so on.

Also Cronenberg's films feel as if they understand the use of the distanciation of technology strangely taking a proxy role in enabling sexuality. The cars in Crash are the most obvious example, but we could point to the seduction-by-telepod scenes in The Fly (or the way that our hero strips naked to go through them and, at least at first, gets more sexually turned on whilst doing so!), or the love scene-via-dripping typewriter in Naked Lunch, or the scenes watching Videodrome inspiring a bit of cigarette burning, the gynaecological tools in Dead Ringers etc, etc.

Even in Cronenberg's novel (major spoilers for Consumed):

Spoiler

The mystery of the cannibalism murder is revealed as entirely faked through a combination of a painstakingly patchworked together and painted 3D printer-created body and a video clip in which a number of characters film themselves having a sexual cannibalistic orgy to suggest a real murder in order to fake a defection to North Korea! Even the character's seeming sexual obsession with having her breast removed is perhaps revealed to be done just to provide the confirmatory bit of DNA evidence on the faked body! Or perhaps it was an amputation fetish-drive that also served a practical purpose? The sex act is both abstracted into areas of extreme sexuality beyond just sexual orientation, and is itself entirely created and mediated through a clinical, abstracting use of technology that irreversibly transforms the body into something else entirely.

That's perhaps why just the portrayal of sex and who is doing it with who in a Cronenberg work is often perhaps the least interesting thing about it! The sex is the means to the end to show the ebb and flow of a relationship not just between a couple but often between a character and the entire world surrounding them. The physical act of sex is given its due in a Cronenberg film as a core human drive but it also seems to be treated as perhaps just being an outward symptom of the more important mental process the characters go through to explore, change or adapt to (or reject) a new form of existence and form of being, whatever it may be. (For instance the relatively explicit sex-less, yet full of metaphorical techno-organic sex imagery, eXistenZ abstracts this entirely into the videogame creator, having given birth to a literally living new entertainment console, entering into it and exploring her work firsthand)

domino harvey wrote:My Cousin Vinny (Jonathan Lynn 1992)And if Wikipedia is to be believed, apparently the film is quite a hit with real-life lawyers, which makes me smile.

I just saw this post and I can personally attest that the courtroom scenes were a fixture in my law school evidence and trial practice classes (along with Anatomy of a Murder).

My spotlight film is Die Zweite Heimat by Edgar Reitz. It's the longest film ever made (leaving aside various cinematic stunts that were never distributed as films) at 25 and a half hours, as well as one of the best. Unfortunately, it came along in the same decade as the greatest film I've ever seen, so it's going to be stuck at number two on my list.

In the 80s, Reitz directed the 15 hour Heimat, a bona fide phenomenon in Germany both in cinemas and serialized on television. It told the story of the Simon family and their village Schabbach from the end of the First World War through to the present day, a complex and moving story that obliquely refracted recent German history. For the film Reitz utilized an intricate visual style (that could only fully be appreciated on film) that mixed a wide array of filmstocks and processing (different kinds of black and white and colour, different grain profiles) to evoke the shifting textures of memory.

For his follow-up, Reitz doubled down on the intricacy and detail, vastly extending his running time while reducing his focus to a single decade. We follow Hermann Simon after he leaves his village at the beginning of the 60s to study in Munich, and follow him (and his loose, large group of friends) throughout the decade. It's not a conventional sequel, since it covers a period already covered in the original film, just in more detail and largely off-stage; and it's not really an actual sequel because

Spoiler

what Hermann does during the sixties in the original film is contradicted by what happens in this one - it's more like a parallel universe that presents a much more compelling narrative for those years. The third series tackles the difficult task of trying to reconcile the two different Heimats of the first two. It suffers a little in comparison, but it's still great.

The detail and intricacy of the film and the relationships it follows are utterly absorbing. Characters drift in and out of the narrative, some becoming absolutely pivotal, some fading out again. It makes for one of the greatest and truest portraits of the ebb and flow of friendship in cinema, and the length of the film allows relationships to evolve in a naturalistic way rare in cinema, where things tend to be more tendentious of necessity. The major events of the decade glance off the main plot in provocative and unexpected ways, and every few hours or so Reitz orchestrates a grand set piece (usually a party, often at the iconic Foxholes) in which all the little relationship details accumulated over the course of the film combine alchemically to effect major surprises and radical alterations to the dynamics of the ensemble. These sequences are emotionally absorbing and marvels of narrative engineering. The first big party at Foxholes is up there with the climax of Rules of the Game as a sustained showpiece of organized chaos. It must run for more than an hour, and you never want it to end. Pay attention to everything that goes on in these huge fresco scenes and you can see the seeds of later developments being sown hours in advance.

It's also a fantastic film about music. Hermann is a budding avant-garde composer (who also has to graft away in oom-pah bands to pay his rent), and the film treats his vocation with uncommon seriousness. He's surrounded by fellow students of similar precocious talents, and the film is just as interested in their musical struggles. Thus, the film is full of terrific and challenging music, much of it written by series compose Nikos Mamngakis, who also contributed one of the all-time great pieces of theme music. (Hear it here). Reitz actually cast musicians in many of the key roles in order to ensure authenticity.

As the film progresses, film enters the picture as well, as a parallel and intertwined pursuit / escape, and politics (building to the ruptures of '68 and the extremely fraught 70s) and economics intrude more and more brutally on the comparative straightforwardness of student life. Camaraderie changes in character and the film becomes more sober and emotionally unsettling. By the time he reaches the final episode Reitz has set himself up with a major conundrum of how exactly anything can be resolved: the ensemble of the early episodes has largely dispersed and most of the remaining characters are mired in compromise. In short, reality has lowered its boom and tidy resolutions are no longer on the table. Reitz's solution has to be seen to be believed. I just adore what he pulls out of his hat at the 25th hour, and I feel like a project this vast needs some kind of grand concluding gesture, though others might be far less satisfied!

Spoiler

His solution is abandoning realism in favour of an episode that is part-fable, part-dream, and in which most of the major characters from the series reappear in unlikely but thematically satisfying roles. It adopts the classic dream-structure of the simple pursuit / return that gets continually deferred and delayed. It's nothing like the phantasmagoric dream-epilogue of Berlin Alexanderplatz, and in a lot of films its sense of reality - all convenient coincidences and gotcha twists - would be routine, but in the context of this film it's a step up into fantasy and, ultimately, into Odyssean myth with the very last scenes.

Stylistically, Reitz follows the lead of the first film, combining shifting filmic textures as a kind of textural collage, but he develops the idea of black-and-white-in-colour more radically with shots that combine the two forms (such as a shot through a window in which only the reflection in the glass is in colour) - this is extended even further (and digitally enhanced) with the subsequent films. He also provides unity through visual leitmotifs that serve to make meaningful links between widely separated scenes that might not otherwise be obviously connected. It's a very literary device that works magnificently as a visual one. Probably the most significant such leitmotif is the one of Hermann turning back and unexpectedly catching his reflection in the mirror, an image that speaks of developing self-knowledge and reproach, and which recurs in very carefully related contexts throughout the film.

How much of Aki Kaurismaki's 90s ouevre is worth dipping into? I saw The Match Factory Girl and enjoyed its very deadpan sense of humour. Is Drifting Clouds the next must-see?