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Author Topic: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts  (Read 561854 times)

ProperCharlie

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #2450 on: October 31, 2017, 04:55:24 AM »
An excellent verdict Jared.   :)

I love both of these and I'll be sorry to see one of them eliminated.  I hope you enjoy them Teproc.


ProperCharlie

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #2451 on: October 31, 2017, 10:05:55 AM »
Once again in the bracket I find I'm judging two films that have many things in common.  These both feature Gong Li, they at least start their action in the Warlord Era of 1920s China, they both feature Chinese opera, they both present critical representations of the Civil War and People's Revolution in 1950s China, and both got banned in China at least in part because of that.  Last but not least, the central characters in these films are concubines.  One loyal.  One deceitful.  However that's where the similarities end.  These are different films that travel away from the shared central background taking very different routes to arrive at destinations that again share some of the same thematic conclusion: Being alive in 20th Century China screwed a lot of people up.


大红灯笼高高挂/Da hong deng long gao gao gua (Zhang Yimou, 1991)
aka Raise the Red Lantern




Round 1 review by Bill Thompson
Round 2 review by Sam the Cinema Snob
Round 3 review by smirnoff
Round 3 resurrection review by pixote
Round 4 review by Teproc


The anti-Pride and Prejudice.  Four sisters, in need of a fortune, all married to the same man.  No dancing, nor romancing.  A deceitful and deadly game of illuminated foot-massage ensues.

Raise the Red Lantern takes place in another universe.  A small, enclosed universe of the variety that Wes Anderson loves to create.  A place apart with arcane rules and a set of characters who are askew from the everyday.  In this pocket universe, there's little whimsy, but a distinct element of Kafka.  A suddenly impoverished woman enters a wealthy man's home as his fourth wife.  The gates close behind her and we learn about this world through her eyes.  It is world of formal titles, summonses from servants, lantern lighting and sudden co-ordinated mass house-keeping disturbing the stillness.  There is much to take in.  All the rituals and rules are said to be a tradition of the family and are enforced, in the main, by the servants.  The master may give the orders, but we never see his face, nor really hear much of him.  He is peripheral.  He is just the current incarnation of the family, but the less than insensible servantry have been here through the ages. 

The comparisons with Wes Anderson do not stop there.  Just as he frames his shots symmterically, so does Zhang Yimou.  Each scene is composed.  The cast and set structures for him to use to paint with, their movements strokes of a cinematic brush.  Sound is vitally important.  There is much silence.  Then there is the clacking of mechanical foot-massagers tapping out their insistent and lustful rhythm - standing in for sex throughout the film.  Punctuating the silence are the songs of Chinese opera, largely through the plot involving the masters third wife, a former opera singer with tastes and ego to match.  Those interventions from the music are rare, and it's almost coldly shunned, replaced by the echoing silence.  Something from the outside that does not belong.

The compound they live in is composed of several houses, one for each wife, each with its own courtyard - a stage on which much of the action takes place.  The whole is made out of utilitarian brick.  It is not an ancient structure but more akin to something contemporary for 1920, something municipal.  Probably a prison.  The walls are high; they prevent escape and any sight of an outside world.  On top of the silence of long and boring days comes a claustrophobia.  This is a place where spirits are broken.  Outside these walls Lindberg is crossing the Atlantic, the Reds and Whites are fighting in Russia, Babe Ruth is hitting home runs, flappers are dancing charlestons and drinking cocktails.  You would never know.   

The masks on the walls of the opera-singer's house fit with the plot, which is essential an country-house intrigue involving the wives plotting against one another, each in search of that evening foot massage after a short ceremony involving all the contestants lining up and a winner being announced via lantern.  There is scheming and hiding true intentions.  Friends turn to foes and vice versa.  Secrets are revealed.  The finale turns this into a horror.  The horror a middle-class in decline have of the masses overpowering them to enforce an alien morality.  The fear of Confucian ghosts from the past, all wonderfully shot on snowy rooftops. 

For such a melodramatic piece, those emotions are kept buttoned-down tight.  Indeed, the ability to repress those feelings are essential to the plot and the journey the lead goes on.  If there's one criticism here is of the writing of the lead character.  To borrow a phrase from Shawshank, she gets 'institutionalised' very quickly.  As she's our eyes and ears to learn about this world that's disconcerting.  I wanted rebellion and indeed the lead starts off rebellious.  But then there was acceptance and participation and passion for foot-massaging that went far beyond the average person's.  Rebellion is replaced by desire, strategy and fear.  Those unexpected plot-jerks add an element of narrative nausea into the highly-stylised visuals.  It can be a disconcerting, but immersive and beautiful experience.


霸王别姬/Ba wang bie ji (Chen Kaige, 1993)
aka Farewell My Concubine




Round 1 review by Dave the Necrobumper
Round 2 review by Bondo
Round 3 review by smirnoff
Round 4 review by oldkid


Revolutionary times.  The parents of the children of the revolution having been beaten, raped, starved, occasionally killed, and eventually cast as leads in the Peking Opera, get to experience the next generation blaming them for everything wrong in the world.  However they are too busy screwing their own lives up to let much of it affect them.

Elaborate, emotional, operatic clockwork.  You can't help but admire the quality of materials used, the exactness and consideration in the design, the intricacy with which its elements combine and mesh to produce the final product.  Once set in motion, the future is inevitable...

The acting is first rate esp Tony Leung and Gong Li in an understated role.  The historical reconstructions and insights are deep, and more than anything relevent to the present in many different ways.  The sweeping historical vistas act as the backdrop in much the same manner as the desert in Lawrence of Arabia.  Even though the guts of what's going in the country as a whole isn't seen, the effects on the circumstances of the leads is enough to give weight to events.  This has the sense that the cinematography in every frame is capturing the historical moment in colour, detail and movmement.  The sheer suffering of the Chinese people of the middle decades of the 20th century is heartfelt and brought dramtically to life.  Set design, costuming, art direction, cinematography are all absolutely lush.  Farewell My Concubine has the opera in its soul just as The Godfather does...

...but I didn't like it.  It's too neat.  Too perfect.  It frightened me.

Despite the extremes of the emotions on display and the warmth it feels for its lead characters (even if at least one of them is deeply unloveable).  Despite the pain and the acclaim and the beauty.  It's all so coldly precise.  During the fateful climaxes of the various characters' stories, the callbacks to previous scenes keep coming thicker and faster.  A pair of shoes removed.  A costume being burned.  A hanging.  The sword.  Checkov may have had his gun, but Chen Kaige has the arsenal of the People's Liberation Army and he pulls every single trigger.  Over it all there's the geological pressure of the actual plot of the opera within the film becoming the plot of the film.  As it does so, it becomes weightier and heavier until it crushes the life out of its characters.  It's all so bloodily, coldly calculated.  Watching it feels like being enmeshed in a visual torture device designed to torment you with the inevitability of your own fate based on a couple of images from your own childhood traumas.

It's far more overtly critical of modern China than Raise the Red Lantern, and yet the ban on this wasn't solely for its criticism of the Communist and Cultural Revolutions.  It was, at least in part, for its portrayal of homosexuality which is awkward and perhaps archetypal, but then for a Chinese made film in the 1990s, very brave.  If you're feeling a tad masochistic and want your hair smushed by a blast of historical, operatic melodrama then this is most definitely the film for you.

Both of these films are depressing.  The leads suffer.  They have much in common and yet they're very, very different.  One's a closed, limited universe of rules and and games, but in which the fates aren't inevitable and the characters have some control, while the other is a sprawling three-hour epic that's nevertheless constructed with such devastating technical prowess that nothing can escape the black-hole of its plot.  Each must meet their fate and all must bow before the onset of history. 
How do I choose?

I should side with the big, beautiful, brilliant vistas and the opera of Farewell My Concuine, but it scares me too much.  I'll stick to what I enjoyed more and what is its match in nearly every respect .  I'm choosing the Kafkaesqueness of Raise the Red Lantern.  Good luck BlueVoid.
« Last Edit: November 21, 2017, 03:57:40 AM by ProperCharlie »

oldkid

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #2452 on: October 31, 2017, 02:12:44 PM »
You make Raise the Red Lantern to be amazing.  I'm looking forward to it.
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Sam the Cinema Snob

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #2453 on: October 31, 2017, 04:12:29 PM »
I agree with this choice. Also love seeing the bracket gain more momentum in this new round.

Teproc

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #2454 on: October 31, 2017, 04:31:08 PM »
You make Raise the Red Lantern to be amazing.  I'm looking forward to it.

It's a very impressive film. A little too cold for my taste, but impressive - and gorgeous.
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pixote

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #2455 on: November 15, 2017, 06:46:37 PM »
Round Five Matchup


M/Other (Suwa Nobuhiro, 1999)
Won over Dang Bireley and the Young Gangsters (verdict by edgar00) (expanded verdict by edgar00)
Won over The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well (verdict by worm@work)
Won over A Petal (verdict by Bondo)
Won over A Brighter Summer Day (verdict by Teproc)

Having previously considered Suwa's 2/Duo for resurrection, I had a fair idea what to expect from M/Other, in terms of style and pacing. Where I messed up was trying to watch a movie like this — full of understated long takes — in the middle of a film noir marathon. The contrast proved to be too jarring. After a series of 75-minute films with highly stylized cinematography, crisp scenes, and orchestral scores, M/Other's two and a half hours of minimalism seemed so empty and inefficient by comparison, sometimes painfully so.

When my mind wandered during the screening, I found myself comparing Suwa's film to Andy Warhol's Empire. I've never scene the latter or even read up on it that much, but I'm guessing one way to view it is an exaggeration of the realistic aesthetic — purity of representation, unadulterated by edits, camera movement, etc. But is it art? Or, at least, more artful than security camera footage? (This could have been a topic of discussion among characters in Östlund's The Square.) M/Other posed to me the same sort of questions on a smaller scale, specifically the question of whether the film's impressive realism was achieved at the expense of artfulness — a trade-off between character authenticity and narrative efficiency — as often seems to be the case with these sorts of semi-improvised character studies.

My other point of comparison during M/Other was Robert Redford's Ordinary People, a very different kind of movie about characters with bottled up feelings that they're unable to articulate. Mainly, I just wanted Judd Hirsch to show up and prod the main characters in M/Other into speaking their minds, even if it necessitated more conventional storytelling. As with 2/Duo, the "emotionally inarticulate" couple frustrated me past the point of engagement. Watching people who actively refuse to articulate what they're thinking is distinctly anti-dramatic. And then, in the scenes when they do finally release their feelings in dramatic fashion, it often feels arbitrary and not fully rooted in the characters as previously defined.

All that aside, I should clarify that I do in fact appreciate Suwa's style and admire the effort here (though not quite as much as in the less unwieldy 2/Duo). Among other things, he elicits a fantastic performance from Watanabe Makiko. She's especially good — effortlessly natural — in the two scenes with her college friend, and after that I resented the story for not letting her smile more often. Miura Tomokazu is good as well, though he has the more thankless role, with his character largely just being an oblivious dick, however good-natured and well-intentioned.

I also find intriguing the occasional use of screeching strings on the soundtrack and the harsh fade outs, which are reminiscent of a projectionist's being late in switching reels. Taken together, they imbue this personal drama with the atmosphere of a horror movie, as if Shun's mother was eventually going to appear and terrorize Aki. I'm glad the story didn't go that direction, but those hints of preternatural tension still left me wanting more stylistic intervention of that sort — which brings me back to the idea that maybe the film as a whole is a bit under-realized. (I should really prioritize watching Jeanne Dielman to see if and how Akerman dramatizes the mundane for two hundred minutes.)

M/Other would make a very interesting double-feature with Moving, providing two very different takes, both stylistically and thematic, on the invisible ripple effects that parents' lives have on their children and vice-versa.




Pickpocket  (Jia Zhangke, 1997)
Won over The Quiet Family (verdict by duder)
Won over The King of Masks (verdict by MartinTeller)
Won over Down the Drain (verdict by BlueVoid)
Won over Wing Chun (verdict by PeacefulAnarchy)

The small city of Fenyang is a noisy place — too noisy, perhaps, for the sound technology Jia had at his disposal at the time of filming Pickpocket. Ambient noises dominate the soundtrack throughout the movie, as part of its excellent evocation of time and place, but that soundscape is actively unpleasant to listen to, due to those technological limitations. If you've ever been woken up by the sounds of someone putting away dishes for two hours straight, you've pretty much heard this movie's audio track. Making matters worse is the fact that my copy of the film generally didn't see fit to translate the various voices blaring from the street or from the many television and radios, reducing even the human voice to unintelligible noise.

The film's visuals are equally grubby, but again it's in a way that feels very true to this setting. Fenyang is a city in transition, and Jia captures that well in all its noisy grubbiness. My favorite shot in the film is when title character Xiao Wu visits a public bath — a place associated with catharsis and cleansing — and there's a urinal next to the baths that about as dirty as a urinal can be. That one image, with all its internal contradictions, pretty much sums up the entire film, which struggles with a romantic attachment to an ugly past in the face of an uncertain future.

Pickpocket is less successful as as character study. The protagonist — an intermittently pathetic, not quite likable, lowlife pickpocket named Xiao Wu — lacks depth, remaining literally and figuratively faceless behind his over-sized glasses. The storytelling often feels improvised to ill effect, a collection of interesting but unshaped moments. I half-jokingly described the film as two hours of sitting in a noisy restaurant listening to a friend scroll through Facebook and complain that everyone he knows is getting married while, at an adjacent table, a group of old men complain about the changing times.

Jia's film is better than my ungenerous analogy implies, but at its core it's still a very typical amateur, low budget, indie character study from the 1990s, full of good ideas and promise of better things to come but not fully satisfying in its own right.



Verdict: I'm glad this bracket contains four other verdicts for each of these films (with at least one more to come) because I feel I've done a poor job of capturing their essence. It seems hardest to write about films that teeter on that line between like and dislike, arousing neither love nor hate, and that's the case here. I likely would have advanced both films through their matchups in the first three rounds (Dang Bireley is the one opponent I haven't seen) but would have gone the other way in round four, choosing A Brighter Summer Day over M/Other and Wing Chun over Pickpocket. This fifth round is a trickier proposition, and I'm rather glad that my vote for M/Other is not the deciding one.

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« Last Edit: November 15, 2017, 07:45:02 PM by pixote »
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Teproc

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #2456 on: November 15, 2017, 06:56:59 PM »
Indecisive or not, excellent write-ups pix. What's great about there being so many reviews for each film now, is that there's no need to be descriptive, and I feel like I've got a pretty good idea of what Pickpocket is by reading those 5 perspectives (it sounds quite good though your review highlights stuff that could get annoying quickly, and I did like M/Other quite a bit as well).
« Last Edit: November 15, 2017, 07:02:57 PM by Teproc »
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pixote

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #2457 on: November 15, 2017, 10:22:57 PM »

Made in Hong Kong
(Fruit Chan, 1997)
               VS               

Only Yesterday
(Isao Takahata, 1991)

smirnoff, I've kept meaning to come back to your verdict, especially since it was between two films I resurrected. I wish I remembered Made in Hong Kong well enough to defend it. Your verdict is convincing enough to make me think, "Huh, maybe I was bamboozled by that one." But then I look at the screenshots in my resurrection review, and I'm like, "How dare he compare this movie to City of the Rising Sun?!"

As for Only Yesterday, it's funny how we seem to like the film about the same only for opposite reasons, with your preferring the adult sections an finding magic in the animation of the ordinary; and my preferring the flashbacks and questioning animation as the proper medium for the story.

Anyway, I really loved reading your thoughts on both films.

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smirnoff

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #2458 on: November 20, 2017, 01:57:11 AM »
smirnoff, I've kept meaning to come back to your verdict, especially since it was between two films I resurrected. I wish I remembered Made in Hong Kong well enough to defend it. Your verdict is convincing enough to make me think, "Huh, maybe I was bamboozled by that one." But then I look at the screenshots in my resurrection review, and I'm like, "How dare he compare this movie to City of the Rising Sun?!"

:))

Quote
As for Only Yesterday, it's funny how we seem to like the film about the same only for opposite reasons, with your preferring the adult sections an finding magic in the animation of the ordinary; and my preferring the flashbacks and questioning animation as the proper medium for the story.

Anyway, I really loved reading your thoughts on both films.

That struck me as well reading back on your thoughts. :)

As for M/Other and Pickpocket, I had considered joining you in the matchup. It's one of the few that I've had nothing to do with on either side... I think by accident, although maybe partly avoidance. If I had ever read anything about them before I've forgotten it now.

I had to laugh reading through the M/Other review. The first three paragraphs had me groaning in understanding. Without being able to bring any particular film to mind, I felt like I'd seen the qualities you describe many times before. But it was really the reaction to those qualities that made me groan sympathetically. And laugh.

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Mainly, I just wanted Judd Hirsch to show up and prod the main characters in M/Other into speaking their minds, even if it necessitated more conventional storytelling

YES!!!!! :))

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All that aside

Font size 36 on "All", cause that's a lot. :) Despite the film landing in the middle of your noir-session you still manage to be a pretty considerate viewer. That said, of all the reactions so far, yours is probably the most negative with regards to that distance and pacing... so I guess noir really can re-calibrate someone. :)

There's clearly something there though, I have to admit. It's made it this far. Pickpocket I'm less interested in.

I didn't see either film on youtube (with subs) or find any torrents. Is it streaming someplace?

smirnoff

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #2459 on: November 21, 2017, 12:23:33 AM »
Raise the Red Lantern

Farewell My Concubine

I should side with the big, beautiful, brilliant vistas and the opera of Farewell My Concuine, but it scares me too much.  I'll stick to what I enjoyed more and what is its match in nearly every respect .  I'm choosing the Kafkaesqueness of Raise the Red Lantern.  Good luck BlueVoid.

Whew, I think I liked reading your reviews more than watching the films, and I like watching the films quite a bit. Beautiful writing. If I have to watch either film in the future, I look forward to reading your review again first. :)

 

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