Author Topic: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts  (Read 561887 times)

smirnoff

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #780 on: July 15, 2009, 04:10:24 PM »
Word of caution to those who end up eliminating Sleeping Man, Nostalgia for the Countryside and M/Other: you and I are done professionally.
I know what you mean. There are some films I'm afraid for in the second round. It's what makes this bracket so exciting.

Melvil

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #781 on: July 15, 2009, 04:47:01 PM »
I only skimmed the M/Other section because I don't want to spoil it, but otherwise nice writeup! Bummer that you probably won't be doing any more. :(

Word of caution to those who end up eliminating Sleeping Man, Nostalgia for the Countryside and M/Other: you and I are done professionally.
I know what you mean. There are some films I'm afraid for in the second round. It's what makes this bracket so exciting.

I feel the same way about some of my bracket movies...The second round could be vicious. :D

pixote

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #782 on: July 31, 2009, 04:53:22 AM »
Round One Resurrection Forecast, Films 21 - 25


The Peony Pavilion (Kuo-fu Chen, 1995)
Lost to Secret Love for the Peach Blossom Spring (verdict by worm@work)
I think worm maybe saw this film on a bad day.  I found it a much more interesting experience than expected (and the subs on the DVD seemed pretty decent, actually!).  That's not to say I understood it much at all.  It's a confusing little movie, partly because there's an expectation of familiarity with the classic Chinese story that the whole film is riffing on, and partly because the mix of dreams and fantasy makes it hard to know what's real and what isn't.

I'm not even sure if the both girls in the first part of the film are real, or if Li Li and Mi Mi are different aspects of the same character.  They look pretty similar in their matching school uniforms, and there's a kind of yin and yang thing between them, with Mi Mi being pretty sunny and Li Li seeming so dour.  There's also just something off with Li Li's character, a certain unreality to her.  And it's Mi Mi who talks all about killing herself in the fan letter she writes to a pop star, even though it's Li Li who seems the more suicidal of the two.

Unreality really dominates the middle portion of the film, which is filled with coincidences (the pop singer Yu Mei, for whom Mi Mi works, happens to rent Li Li's old apartment) and oddities (the untouched bedroom worm referenced, for example).  I'm thinking this whole sequence has to be a fantasy.  Not only does Mi Mi have her dream job (despite a confusing pronoun in the subtitles, I'm pretty sure Yu Mei is the pop star Mi Mi writes that fan letter to), but Yu Mei's manager seems to be grooming Mi Mi to be the next Yu Mei.  Too good to be true!  So even though Yu Mei is the seeming protagonist of this part of the film (as Li Li was in the opening), it's possible, just as in the first half, to read it as really being about Mi Mi.  Are you following all these names?

In the epilogue of the film, which begins with a telling cut from a photograph of Li Li in flames to a shot of Mi Mi (at least I think it's Mi Mi) awaking as if from a dream, Mi Mi writes another letter to the pop star, thanking her for replying to her letter from years earlier.  There's no acknowledgement of the second part of the film here, no hint that Mi Mi worked for the pop star.  Instead she writes, "That was the most difficult time in my life.  Had no love, no achievement, my family despised me.  Listening to your music, I wanted only to end it all.  In desperation, I wrote to you.  I never thought you'd write back to advise and encourage me.  I was surprised beyond words."  This all leads me to believe that it's really Mi Mi whose life mirrors the classic story of the Peony Pavilion, not Li Li or Yu Mei, despite the more explicit connections in their stories.  And that, like I said, is interesting.

Also of interest to me is how Japanese this movie feels, despite being a modern Taiwanese take on a Chinese tale with cinematography by Christopher Doyle.  I can't quite put a finger on where that sense comes from, but it's definitely there.  (Or maybe I just need to watch more Taiwanese cinema.)

So, yeah, this movie might be a mess or it might be kind of ingenious.  I'm not sure, but I'm leaning strongly towards ... mess.



Village of Dreams (Yoichi Higashi, 1996)
Lost to Comrades, Almost a Love Story (verdict by Melvil)
I've just read about thirty reviews of this movie, and I think it's safe to say that it's largely underestimated and, to an even greater extent, misunderstood.  Fans of the film seem to embrace it just as charming and easy-going childhood nostalgia, while critics dismiss it as boring and simplistic childhood nostalgia that offers nothing new.  (Of course, there's also the Amazon reviewer who gave it a single star because — let me quote in full — "I enjoyed this film , but it has nude childern and I did not think it was needed in the story ."  Ah, yes, if only someone had put some swim trunks on those poor, poor childern.)  I have no grudge against that first group because they have a pretty good point: Village of Dreams captures the spirit of childhood about as well as any other, and it might be unrivaled in capturing the sense of the way time passes when you're a kid — the total dominance of the present day, with just the slightest sense of the past and or the future.  The two child stars here are absolutely perfect in that respect.  They invest every single action — whether they're walking or fishing or laughing or fighting — with their entire selves, always living right in that present moment.  My favorite example is a shot of one of the twins, sitting in a room by himself and unrolling a scroll.  It's a pleasure to watch just because of the completely joyous enthusiasm he brings to the totally insignificant task.

But, as I implied at the outset, there's much Village of Dreams than mere nostalgia.  I bet most reviewers of the film would be surprised to see Higashi's comments in the Milestone film notes, asking questions such as, "How were they relating to nature and their environment? And from there on, how did the Japanese 'progress' to produce this 'faceless system'?" or to read him state, "We made this film, not to turn back to the past with nostalgia, but to critically inspect the present from a recollective standpoint."  Even Keiko McDonald's ten-page analysis of the movie in Reading a Japanese Film barely scratches the film's thematic surface, largely overlooking the significance of the children's twin nature, for example.  Most reviews I've read (maybe all, in fact) seem to accept that aspect of the story as just autobiographical happenstance — when, really, it's the film's primary unifying thematic and structural element.  The first act of the film examines the twins as one inextricably bound pair; the second act then separates them and examines them in isolation, and the third act reunites them, with the tension between their sameness and difference now altered.  All together, it's a very cool dialectical meditation on human individuality that has very strong political significance both in the context of post-war Japan and the context of highly modernized and globalized mid-90s Japan.  See?

This parallel begins to address Melvil's main criticism of the film — the presence of the three old women and the other supernatural elements.  Now, I actually enjoy those characters just at a surface level.  For one thing, they just make me smile; and I can happily accept them just from a child's point of view, that idea of always wondering who might be watching from the woods; plus, their farewell is lovely.  But, more than that, I appreciate them as key emblems of premodern Japan, rooted in folklore, aligned as influences on the twins' upbringing with Senji (the feral shibaten boy) and Hatsumi (the destitute, submissive girl of traditional Japan).  These characters clash with representatives of the modern — specifically, the boys' bureaucratic father and their independent, outspoken mother (more parallels in opposition).  It's actually a little more nuanced than I'm making out here, because Senji and Hatsumi represent a challenge to the old women's nostalgic view of Japanese's utopian past and also illustrate the limits of the parents' modern sensibilities (the mother won't let Senji into her home)...

I'm going to stop there, I guess. I could talk about this film for a long while, but, it should be clear by now that I'll have at least one more chance to chime in on this film in this bracket — and hopefully more.  And I forgive you, Melvil.  Comrades is pretty good, too.  This was a brutal first-round matchup.


Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl (Joan Chen, 1998)
Lost to Fallen Angels (verdict by jbissell)
I mostly agree with jbissell's review of Xiu Xiu, with the exception that I didn't find it quite heartbreaking.  Stephen Holden sort of gets at my take at the end of his Times review: "Because it is a secondhand tale told by someone imagining what happened, the harsher aspects of the story are softened by the movie's allegorical perspective. As much as the film sympathizes with Xiu Xiu's plight, it never delves into her soul. ... The rigors of the climate and of Xiu Xiu's austere outdoor life are de-emphasized by the film, which prefers to drink in the desolate beauty of the landscape and to concentrate on symbolic visual portents. The demure poetic distance the film maintains from its brutal physical facts mutes the impact of the story. Instead of devastating, Xiu Xiu is merely sad."  Holden overstates the case, maybe, but the gist is right.  The decision to root the story in what an outside character imagines happened is a nice, theoretical nod to the limitations historical knowledge and all that, but it also robs the drama of some of its immediacy and, for me, ruined the end of the film.  That finale felt very false to me, dripping with excess poetic license meant to emphasize the sense of tragedy but instead undercutting it.  Despite those misgivings, it's still a very solid film.  And jbissell is totally right about Lopsang's "quiet strength" — I was going to use that same exact phrase.  I'd love to see him in an Outlaw Josey Wales type of film.  That would be amazing.



Dreams (Akira Kurosawa, 1990)
Lost to Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade (verdict by THATguy)
Kurosawa dreamed a lot like Dante, apparently.  He's rarely an active protagonist here and more often just a passive witness.  Generally it works like this: he's lost in an unfamiliar environment (with superb art direction); he runs into a random figure who lectures — at great length — about some specific issue; then the dreamer watches as some pretty cool visual spectacle unfolds.  The more central the protagonist is and the more tension there is in his situation, the better the segments seem to be (the best are "The Tunnel" and "Sunshine through the Rain", probably).  When the protagonist is more peripheral, there's little to obscure the film's didacticism.  In those segments, Kurosawa, the director, lectures directly to us (instead of Kurosawa, the dreamer, being the one lectured).  And some of those lectures are really, really preachy and on-point.  But even then, the film remains engaging just on a visual level.  The settings and colors and costumes and makeup are all a lot of fun.  I can't say the same about the camerawork (which is ridiculously shaky in the second dream) and the editing (a lot of odd cuts, suggesting a lack of coverage), but those flaws are pretty minor.  Oh, and I definitely agree with THATguy about "The Blizzard" feeling really drawn out.  That was my least favorite segment, which is funny because it's the one that most deviates from the formula I was half-complaining about above.



The D-Slope Murder Case (Akio Jissoji, 1998)
Lost to Cure (verdict by Melvil)
I'm more interested in the backstory here than the film itself.  The short story the film was adapted from was written by Tarō Hirai under his pen name Edogawa Rampo — a name he chose because it sounded like Edgar Allan Poe.  He wrote "The D-Slope Murder Case" in 1925, and it was the first appearance of his Sherlock Holmes-like detective Kogoro Akechi: "Like Holmes, Akechi is a brilliant but eccentric detective who consults with the police on especially difficult cases. He is a master of disguise and an expert at judo whose genius lets him solve seemingly impossible cases. Also like Holmes, Akechi makes use of a group of young boys to gather information. His version of the Baker Street Irregulars is known as the Boy Detective Club. Akechi smokes Egyptian cigarettes when he is thinking about a case."  Anime fans might recognize him from Lupin III.  And Kinji Fukasaku made "Black Lizard", another Kogoro Akechi story, into a film in 1968, with a screenplay by Yukio Mishima and starring transvestite actor Akihiro Maruyama as the title villain.  It sounds must-see awful.

All this background information is my way of saying that there was a lot of potential here, but Jissoji's film doesn't quite capitalize on it.  The biggest problem, for me, is that the character of Akechi doesn't factor into the main plot of the film until an hour in — and it's only a ninety-five minute film.  Then, when he does appear, the brief glimpses of his personal life are more interesting than his involvement in the case.  In his investigation, he either confirms what we already knew from the first hour or he jumps too far ahead of us in his deductions, robbing us of the fun of following the clues for ourselves.  Meanwhile, there's this random side bit about him adopting a kid or something (maybe the first member of his Boy Detective Club?), which I imagine I would have appreciated more had I gone in more familiar with the character's history.

In short, I agree with pretty much everything Melvil wrote in his verdict, except I can't go quite so far as to recommend the film.  There are a lot of good elements — more than I've acknowledged above — but the film as a whole falls just short.  I'd love to get my hands on Rampo's original story to see how it compares and whether the movie's adaptation was too faithful or too free.

God, I hope this is the longest one of these forecasts I write.

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smirnoff

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #783 on: July 31, 2009, 07:05:00 AM »
Wonderfully written and insightful reviews pix! Your Resurrection Forecast is a big part of what makes this bracket so great.

Thor

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #784 on: July 31, 2009, 10:17:22 AM »
You're thorough.  :)

But, erm, did you actually make any 'forecasts' here? Perhaps I missed something. Nice reviews though!

Also, not really directed at you, but just curious: Why is that detective based on Holmes if the writer was a fan of Poe? Surely C. Auguste Dupin is more of a direct influence?
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pixote

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #785 on: July 31, 2009, 10:24:03 AM »
But, erm, did you actually make any 'forecasts' here? Perhaps I missed something. Nice reviews though!

Yeah, 'forecast' is just a name that sounded cool, but I've tried to deemphasize that aspect and focus more on discussing the films more generally (and responding to the verdicts, since for many of these films, nobody else has seen them).  I did sort of guarantee resurrection for Village of Dreams, though, this time around.

Also, not really directed at you, but just curious: Why is that detective based on Holmes if the writer was a fan of Poe? Surely C. Auguste Dupin is more of a direct influence?

I'm guessing it's just because Edgar Allan Poe is an ever-so-slightly cooler name than Arthur Conan Doyle.  :)  But, according to Wikipedia, Rampo was an especially big fan of Poe, but also heavily influenced by Doyle and Maurice Leblanc.

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worm@work

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #786 on: July 31, 2009, 10:25:11 AM »
Woohoo! Resurrection verdicts :)!!

I am really sorry pix but I don't remember the details of Peony Pavilion well enough to be able to respond very meaningfully to your write-up. I really pretty much took the film at face value and never saw it as possibly being Mi Mi's fantasy. Like I said I don't remember the specifics but I thought Mi Mi was able to talk about killing herself because unlike Li Li, she's not really suicidal, and is therefore able to romanticize the notion. And all the pat coincidences would be so much less problematic if it was indeed a fantasy in Mi Mi's head that we're watching being enacted. But I'm not quite sure everything holds up to this interpretation... Li Li's issues at home (the religious oppressive environment) and her dreams are still real? There's a small part of me that wants to watch this again in the light of your interpretation but I think I can suppress it ;D.
Btw, I do/did see what you're saying about the film feeling so Japanese.

pixote

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #787 on: July 31, 2009, 10:35:34 AM »
But I'm not quite sure everything holds up to this interpretation... Li Li's issues at home (the religious oppressive environment) and her dreams are still real?

I'm not sure it holds up either (hence the tentative conclusion that the film is just a mess).  I didn't really start piecing this idea together until the final shot of the film, which was Mi Mi sitting in front of the backdrop from Li Li's dream (which had the feel of a big reveal).  And, if I remember correctly, though, we never see Mi Mi at her home, so you could just argue that the oppressive of the house only lets the Li Li aspect of her character exist there.  It's possible that Mi Mi never has a scene without Li Li or Yu Mei present.

But yeah, even if this is all true and clever and how the film means to operate, it doesn't make for a very good first viewing.

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Tequila

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #788 on: July 31, 2009, 11:06:39 AM »
Hum.. I think both 'The Tunnel' and 'The Blizzard' are probably my favorite episodes in Dreams which, considering how they break with this formula
Generally it works like this: he's lost in an unfamiliar environment (with superb art direction); he runs into a random figure who lectures — at great length — about some specific issue; then the dreamer watches as some pretty cool visual spectacle unfolds.
, probably says a lot about my enjoyment of the film. I'll agree though that the latter is pretty slow and having it follow both 'Sunshine Through The Rain' and 'The Peach Orchard' made the first half of the film pretty tiresome.
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Melvil

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #789 on: July 31, 2009, 02:49:04 PM »
Nothing brightens my day like a resurrection forecast! ;D

I'm happy to see Village of Dreams back, besides relieving a healthy dose of guilt, it genuinely deserves it. That's one of those matchups where the losing movie is better than many of my other winners. Also glad to hear your thoughts on D-Slope. Did I really recommend it? Based on my memory of it now I wouldn't. But I've gotta see Black Lizard. :D

Enjoyed the other reviews as well, but I'm still waiting for a vehement disagreement with the original reviewer. Work on that, would ya?