Author Topic: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts  (Read 561804 times)

roujin

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #250 on: December 30, 2008, 06:55:53 PM »
 ;D

edgar00

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #251 on: December 30, 2008, 09:51:27 PM »
Ley Lines sounds like something Cronenberg would make. roujin, would he say this Miike guy is the Japanese version of David Cronenberg or am I reading this wrong? Regardless, you've made me want to watch Ley Lines.
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Melvil

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #252 on: January 01, 2009, 05:04:11 PM »

Give It All (1998, Itsumichi Isomura)

Etsuko - a typical Japanese high school student, who's unlucky in love, an academic failure, and plain bored with life. That's until one day, the view of a boat gliding gracefully in the sea inspires her to take up the oar. Since she's rejected by her school's all-male rowing team, she decides to form her own all-women team.-IMDB


Here we have a movie about rowing.

It's tough to explain this movie. It's not a particularly unique story, but it's presented in a way that really impressed me. It's very focused, and spends little time on anything it doesn't deem important.

Etsuko is at the center of the story. Little effort is spent explaining her interest in rowing, it is just accepted, and I give it credit for not creating arbitrary obstacles for her to overcome. A girls rowing team is unprecedented in her school, but the school is willing to help her get one started. Even the boys team, which has to share the boathouse and practice times with the girls team, is supportive and helps train them.

Recruiting the other 4 girls for the team is dealt with quickly. Two of them we don't meet until the first day of practice, because that is when they become relevant to the story. If I have one complaint about this, it's that we never get much of a look at any of the other girls outside the context of the team. Their dynamic as a group is fully fleshed out, but they're mostly ignored as individuals. I have no doubt this is by design, but it was one instance where I felt it was a disservice.

Once the team forms, the remainder of the movie is spent with them as they bond, train, and eventually compete in tournaments. The heart of the story is in their journey as a team, and it spans several years (starting in freshmen year) so it's pretty extensive. It's all nicely done and most of it was enjoyable to watch, but all of the races become repetitive (a complaint I usually have about any sports movie). Everything leads up to their final competition, and their last chance to succeed as a team. The movie is solid all the way through, but it's the way the ending is handled that made me really regard it higher than I thought I would.

No way to keep going without spoiling a bit, but let's just say the ending is not all candy and rainbows. It's quite a downer, actually, but is much more meaningful and subtle than I had expected.



Not One Less (1999, Yimou Zhang)

The school teacher in the remote mountain village of Shuixian has to leave for a month, requiring the mayor to bring in the only substitute available, 13 year old Wei Minzhi. With minimal instruction and no experience, she is left in care of 28 children, and the challenge of keeping all of them attending school, not one less.


There is a lot I liked about this movie, but the characters are the biggest strength. Yimou Zhang uses a cast of non-actors that are basically playing themselves, and it comes through in the performances. There's a simplicity to them that I was really drawn to. The story opens with the introduction of Wei, and from the start she is an unusual protagonist. She is immature and completely irresponsible as a teacher. The only thing she seems to care about is the 50 yuan she was promised for the job, and the 10 more if all of the kids are still attending when the month is up.

So when a young boy named Zhang is absent from role call one morning, Wei becomes obsessed with getting him back. She visits Zhang's mother and finds out he has gone to the city to find work so he can help pay off the troubled families debt. Despite this, Wei takes it upon herself to go to the city and find (kidnap?) him.

She recruits the rest of the students to help her get money for the trip, and with this new found motivation (misguided as it may be), Wei finally steps up to being a real teacher, and she and the class come together for the first time. The kids in the class are awesome, and every scene with them is a ton of fun. My favorite scene is where, after raising the money, they have enough extra to buy 2 cans of coca-cola which they share between all 27 of them. It's a simple scene, but incredibly touching. The small role of teacher Gao and especially the mayor are also great characters.

In the second half of the movie Wei finally reaches the city and sets out to find Zhang, which looks more and more like an impossible task. The second half is way too drawn out in parts, and without the supporting cast I grew to love in the first half it really suffered for it. It's actually used to pretty good effect to communicate what Wei is going through, running into dead end after dead end, but it's just not as enjoyable as the first half.

Wei's character is the oddest, but most interesting part of the movie. She's not a very admirable character, her motives appear to be entirely selfish. Of course, eventually she saves the day, and her motives do evolve into something more noble, but it's ultimately her stubbornness and self-interest (plus some dumb luck) that paves the path. The end is a little over the top as well, but it's a feel-good ending, so what can I say?



Verdict

I really enjoyed both movies. Give It All is more solid all around, but Not One Less is more interesting, and at it's best the better entertainment. So Not One Less wins. Yay!

roujin

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #253 on: January 02, 2009, 01:18:57 AM »
I seem to remember watching the Japanese television show that was basically the same story as Give It All. Was it good? I have no idea.

I think I approve of this.

pixote

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #254 on: January 02, 2009, 01:22:22 AM »
Nice, Melvil.  Sounds like the matchup was the pleasant but not life-changing experience it looked to be on paper.  I've seen and enjoyed Not One Less, and I don't think it'll seem out of place in the next round — but it'll probably need the right set of circumstances to go beyond that.  I'm looking forward to Give It All, though I bet my review will be very similar to yours.  Even without having watched the movie, certain of your criticisms rang very true with me, both positive ("Little effort is spent explaining her interest in rowing, it is just accepted, and I give it credit for not creating arbitrary obstacles for her to overcome.") and negative ("Their dynamic as a group is fully fleshed out, but they're mostly ignored as individuals.").

Curious to see if you will choose something life-changing for your next matchup...

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edgar00

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #255 on: January 02, 2009, 09:56:31 AM »
As usual, I've never heard of those movies, but Give It All sounds kind of boring. I'm glad to see Not One Less move onwards.
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Thor

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #256 on: January 02, 2009, 11:51:19 AM »


"A story of beauty, passion and forbidden fruit!" v "Two Thumbs Up the Highly Sensual!"

Soooo... neither of these films are really what the mid-1990's faintly-racist-marketing tin they were packaged in - designed no doubt to lure a mix of the arthouse patron and the perv - says they are. Beyond this similarity they have related period-set narratives, with one concerning the arrival of a village girl into a city family that is falling apart, and the other of a city girl moving into the farmlands of a new country and a forging a new ‘family’. Here's what I think of them:

The Scent of Green Papaya (Anh Hung Tran, 1993)

One of the most potent examples of arthouse ponce ever perpetrated, the high reputation of this film (Camera D'Or winner at Cannes, Nominated for Best Foreign Language Oscar, a Cesar for best debut) is baffling to me. I can only assume that the entire world of film was beset by an affliction for bird chirps and a love for scenes of Asian women washing their neck and face.

Filmed entirely on a sound-stage in France, the film is set in 1950's Saigon, with the turbulent events of that period of Vietnam's history forming a subtly alluded-to background. In the first-half, we follow a young country girl named Mui, who enters a middle-class home to be their servant. The family is dysfunctional in lots of deliberately ambiguous ways that are drawn out interminably amid scenes of the young girl's naive introduction to life, the family's quirks and dark secrets, and their gradual adoption/adoration of her. To be fair, these scenes were quite pleasant, if a little lifeless, and I liked the young actress' performance, the scenes of kids being kids, the compositions. So far, so arthouse minimalism. Very slow, very slight in the plotting, cutesy, some nice visuals of sap dripping, papayas being peeled.... quite enjoyable when its on the girl, boring as hell when its about the family. But absolutely nothing special at all when compared to what other filmmakers are able to achieve with this same style and with far less pretension.

Hello part two of the film! 10 years later, we have Mui aged 20. The family patriarch disposed of at the end of act one, Mui is left serving Khuyen, a family friend who she fancied the pants off of when she was a kid. Will he ever notice how great she is and what a shit his current Westernized girlfriend is? Because the audience did within 1minute of the segment… The part of Mui is played in this segment by an actress who completely derails the film with her wooden performance. Oh my god is she awful. She does however have a nice technique when washing her face, or something, so we get a lot of that. A lot. And we get a lot of very, very, very, very, drawn out scenes of the building of the 'forbidden love' that the poster promised us that are so excruciatingly poorly handled, so obvious in the plotting and so disturbing in its sexual politics as to completely ruin whatever goodwill the first-half had created. Just like the first half, there’s more to it than the surface, some good cultural digs and historical references and social resonances… whatever – the surface is so poor, I would never revisit this film to find out what they were.

I really hated the second half of this film so much. If you want a fairly pleasant, romanticized view of childhood and/or 1950’s Vietnam, then you could enjoy the first half and just turn it off before part two, I guess.

Picture Bride (Kayo Hatta, 1995)

Picture Bride is an unassuming, crowd-pleasing movie. Your mum might like it. It’s very Hallmark channel meets Merchant Ivory, and plays sort of like a less melodramatic/sexually fraught Wild Is The Wind. It concerns the real story of the thousands of women who left Japan for Hawaii between 1901 and 1923 to marry Japanese men who had already made the trip. The introduction and increased accessibility of photography revolutionized the practice.

We follow Riyo, a young “city girl” with a “dark secret” that, just like in Wake me if I smell like green papaya, really isn’t that big of a thing when it’s revealed either. That bothered me somewhat, but not as much as in the other film.

Anyhoo, Riyo sees a photo of her husband to be, and after having her photo taken, she’s off to Hawaii! Except when she gets there she finds the sugar cane field worker she’s lumped with is not like the handsome geezer in the photo. So, their relationship is from the start based on betrayal and unease. The rest of the film follows a fairly predictable path as Riyo first rejects her husband and the tough lifestyle but grows to appreciate both, along the way forming an important friendship with Kana, one of the other picture brides already on the island.

But unlike its competitor here, it’s not pretentious at all, and just tells its old-fashioned story with efficiency. The pleasure of the film is again in the incidental details (Riyo’s childlike biting of her husband’s hand under the covers on their wedding night, male and female workers in the sugar fields singing their sexual politics to each other), but here they all feel germane to the story, rather than just displaying style for the sake of it. For example, though the film is set in Hawaii, it has no desire to picture-postcard the setting, and it’s over an hour before we even see a beach or the ‘sexy waterfall’ of the poster.

It also has a body-washing scene! This one has a quiet, cheeky nod to Psycho, but doesn’t fixate on endless neck-soaping, thank god. A very old Toshiro Mifune also shows up for a bit as well, which was fun.

To its detriment, it has a horrendously misjudged dream sequence before the final acts, and an unnecessarily cheesy final voiceover. Again, the sexual politics of the ending didn’t please me greatly, but it felt natural to the story Hatta wanted to tell, and at the end of her long journey, Riyo was shown to be more than just a cipher for male desire. Good for her, and good for Picture Bride.
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Melvil

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #257 on: January 02, 2009, 12:48:58 PM »
Thanks, everyone!

Was it good? I have no idea.

Too bad. I saw it was remade in 2005 as a tv series, not sure that was entirely necessary, but I wondered if it was any good.

Nice, Melvil.  Sounds like the matchup was the pleasant but not life-changing experience it looked to be on paper.  I've seen and enjoyed Not One Less, and I don't think it'll seem out of place in the next round — but it'll probably need the right set of circumstances to go beyond that.  I'm looking forward to Give It All, though I bet my review will be very similar to yours.  Even without having watched the movie, certain of your criticisms rang very true with me, both positive ("Little effort is spent explaining her interest in rowing, it is just accepted, and I give it credit for not creating arbitrary obstacles for her to overcome.") and negative ("Their dynamic as a group is fully fleshed out, but they're mostly ignored as individuals.").

Curious to see if you will choose something life-changing for your next matchup...

Pretty much dead on in all regards. Life-changing would be cool, but I'm still picking at random, so it's luck-of-the-draw. ;)

Good for her, and good for Picture Bride.

Nice reviews, Thor. Sounds like neither movie was too exceptional (unless you're really into body washing), but you clearly made the right choice with Picture Bride.

roujin

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #258 on: January 02, 2009, 11:44:16 PM »
roujin's 5th or so verdict...

Swallowtail Butterfly vs. Young and Dangerous


Swallowtail Butterfly (Shunji Iwai, 1996)

This is without a doubt one of the weirder movies we're likely to encounter in the bracket. I have no idea what this is. I'm not sure how to describe it. Basically, it follows immigrants who have gone to Japan because the Yen was really powerful at the time and they hope to strike it rich. The film explains in this in the [noembed]opening minute in a cool Chou-Chou-esque thing majigger[/noembed] that was getting me all excited because I'd been disappointed in Iwai's other films. Anyway, the film then goes into the story of Glico and Ageha and how they meet and whatever. Then they meet other Yentown-ers who are living in some weird makeshift town outside the city. It's paradise. The movie tells us is paradise by shooting it all like a CINECAST!ing music video. Granted, it looks awesome but when you follow it up by two other performances by Chara (the actress who plays Glico), [noembed]it gets a bit ridiculous[/noembed]. After this, the film turns to the struggle of these Yentowners to start some band and have a club. Then [noembed]some random dude pops up 40 minutes in and starts asking questions and pointing fingers[/noembed] in what's probably the best scene in the film. This movie is just really surreal, honestly. There's such erratic shifts in tone and such blatant self-indulgence at display. I mean, what happens when you have scene after scene of stuff that doesn't gel together at all, a very distraught roujin. More interesting stuff: the film is mostly in English. Apparently, most of the characters can't speak Japanese (cuz they're immigrants) so they speak in English, or, rather, Engrish. Some scenes are incomprehensible to me cuz of the accents at display. Plus it's just surreal. And you get such great lines as "let's see your stomach, you CINECAST!ing kangaroo." Great, great entertainment. I'm pretty sure this movie is awful (in a Southland Tales kind of way) but it's so damn entertaining and weird and doesn't bring up retarded political bullshit (at least not totally incompetently like in ST), that I can still enjoy it. I'm not sure what all of this means, actually. I really don't.

Why is the song "My Way" used as a recurring motif? lol


Young and Dangerous (Lau Wai-keung, 1996)

uh, young guns join the triads and do good. Interesting! Apparently, this guy was also the cinematographer on Chungking Express so I expected some interesting visuals, hopefully. But, it seems that was for naught. At points, there's cool neon-stuff + slo-mo stuff but that's about it visually. The camera is jumpy and kinetic and that's cool but there's not much happening otherwise. Apparently, this film was the basis for something like nine sequels (two of them in the same year) so apparently it was a big deal. I can see why, sort of. The story is pretty basic. The young guys try and make good in the triad but get CINECAST!ed bcuz they're young and some old dude is like "hell naw, motherCINECAST!er, I got this" or something or other and plot stuff happens and whatever. It's pretty conventional. It reminds me of the movies I used to see on Saturday afternoons on the WB cuz I had nothing else to do and it was on. Probably, the movie's interesting aspect is that it was based on a manga and the film pays homage to this by sometimes fading into stills from the manga (directly reproduced as live-action film). It was pretty surreal and awesome watching [noembed]the introduction of the characters[/noembed]. It gave me hope that it would do something interesting with this. But, it seemed content in just randomly doing it without purpose (although it definitely was pretty cool at the end, even if the ending is totally stupid and awesome). uh, points off for having totally awful music. Plus points for having totally [noembed]awesome dialogue exchanges[/noembed]. Uh, yeah.

Anyway, I think I want more people to watch Swallowtail if only cuz it's so bizarre. Although, I did consider killing it off just to get pix's opinion on it quicker. But, it's just more interesting and there's more going on. So, it moves to the next round.

jbissell

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #259 on: January 03, 2009, 12:47:53 AM »
I want more blue next time.