Round One Resurrection Forecast, Films 26 - 30Red Dust (Ho Yim, 1990)
Lost to The King of Masks (verdict by edgar00)edgar did a really nice job reviewing this film. I'm not sure I have that kind of patience right now. It was struggle enough just to make it through to the end. The main performances are quite good and the historical setting is intriguing, but the romance at the heart of the patchy narrative completely failed for me. Maybe it was just the awful music, I don't know. I was much more interested in the scenes between Brigette Lin and Maggie Cheung. They're tremendously appealing together. If they have a
Romy and Michelle-type movie in their shared filmography, I can't want to see it. Back to
Red Dust, though. It's perhaps worth noting that it
totally kicked ass at the Golden Horse Awards, earned a heap of nominations at the Hong Kong Film Awards, and has an impressive 7.8 user rating at IMDb after 143 votes. The
Strictly Film School review declares it "an atmospherically exquisite and densely allusive, yet simple and elegant chronicle of love, sacrifice, and survival amidst national turmoil," and the review at
So Good is all positive, though in a restrained way. So there are dissenting views out there. I just happen to agree with edgar. Strongly.
Good Men, Good Women (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1995)
Lost to To Live (verdict by lotr-sam0711)I've seen six other Hou films, but nothing this elliptical or impenetrable. The film doesn't reveal the narrative connection between its three time periods until about forty minutes in; and it never really reveals the thematic connections. I've just read a dozen reviews expecting to learn what a dumb viewer I am for not piecing it all together, but the readings of the people who love the film are pretty mundane — simple compare/contrast stuff and generic themes like the influence of the past of the present. Nothing compelling. I connected more (though only slightly) with the dis in the
Philadelphia City Paper, which called the movie "a confused exercise in pomo lit wank" and "[p]onderous rather than evocative." Like lotr-sam0711, I think the film's inability to bridge its various storylines is a major failing. Unlike lotr-sam0711, I very much cared about the stories in modern times. The scenes between Annie Shizuka Inoh and Jack Kao are all wonderful — comparable, in a way, to the first section of
Three Stories. The present-day section, with Annie Shizuka Inoh alone, is almost as good. I love the device of the fax machine (especially since it wasn't a plain paper fax) and the way the stolen diary was used and the fact that some indoor badminton was played. As for the historical, film-within-a-film scenes (or, as some reviewers suggest, how the actress imagines those scenes), they're all pretty good individually, but as a whole they just don't have the vibrancy of the modern day stuff. Ten years is a lot to cover in seven scenes, or however many it was, and the result feels as thin as you might expect. Also, I don't know if Fox Lorber is to blame or what, but the color of that footage is really unappealing. It's like black-and-white processed through rust and mold filters. A shame, too, because a lot of the compositions are really nice. I'm not sure where this all leaves us.
The Soong Sisters (Mabel Cheung, 1997)
Lost to Bounce KO Gals (verdict by Colleen)This bracket has been very mean to cinematographer Arthur Wong.
The Soong Sisters is already the third film of his that I'm reviewing for resurrection (after
A Confucian Confusion and
Sleepless Town) and two more are coming up (
Iron Monkey and
Once Upon a Time in China). 0-for-5! That doesn't seem fair, given the quality of Wong's photography. His camerawork is easily one of the strongest assets of
The Soong Sisters. The film is exactly as Colleen said, "one of those glossy, beautifully shot historical epics where the costumes and settings are fabulous, but the story itself becomes a bit stiff and stilted. Gorgeous to look at but a little dull and the characters turn into mannequins." I love the idea of this kind of old-fashioned epic filmmaking — the sweeping score, the sweeping camera, the detailed sets, the cast of thousands — and that was enough for me to enjoy this movie for a while, but ultimately it was much more
Exodus than, say,
Dr. Zhivago. (Note: I haven't actually seen
Dr. Zhivago. It just sounds right in that sentence.) In short, the script of
The Soong Sisters isn't up to the level of the production values. It's all passably entertaining but rarely hits with any force. If it were a new tv series, I might give it another week. But, like Colleen, I can't quite recommend it as a film.
Tokyo Biyori (Naoto Takenaka, 1997)
Lost to Only Yesterday (verdict by worm@work)I just learned that director and star Naoto Takenaka's first film was something called
Molester Train: Search for the Black Pearl, a pinku film from 1984 directed by Yôjirô Takita, whose
Departures just won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film.
Search for the Black Pearl was the 23rd film in the
Molester Train series (alternatively translated as
Groper Train), and sometimes carries the title
Underwear Inspection instead. All this is to say that if I ran a movie theater, next weekend we'd be screening that film on a double bill with
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Because my movie theater would be awesome. Anyway,
Tokyo Biyori is pretty far removed from pinku. It's more of a postcard to love — which perhaps explains the casting of
Love Letter's Miho Nakayama. (
April Story's Takako Matsu is here as well, along with
Swallowtail Butterfly's Tadanobu Asano — completing the Shunji Iwai trifecta.) I agree with worm (I think) that the film is at its best when it's celebrating the relationship between the main couple: the joy of watching them play a stone piano in a field, having fun on a train with a soda can, kicking that can all the way home; and just the way Naota Takenaka's character is always randomly smiling at his wife like he's just fallen in love with her all over again. There's a similar joy, for me, just in watching Takenaka take photographs, and I really liked the way the film connected his love for his wife with his love for photography. There's probably an interesting paper to be written here about how the camera here intensifies their connection, rather than acting as a distancing, objectifying force or whatever. This film itself is fittingly well photographed, with lovingly composed shots and a great autumnal color palette. It's all so tender and careful and quiet that it makes the few moments of melodrama and clumsy nonlinear editing all the more disruptive. In fact, most everything dealing with the undefined psychological/social/mental condition of Miho Nakayama's character seemed pedestrian. It makes for a few gratifying moments where I'm all, "Aww, nothing can change how he feels about her!" — but, as worm said, "it was mostly too little too late." But I still recommend the film, if only tentatively. Like Iwai's
Love Letter, it's just sweet enough.
The Slight Fever of a 20-Year-Old (Ryosuke Hashiguchi, 1993)
Lost to In The Heat of the Sun (verdict by roujin)roujin's verdict covers most of my reaction, even though he liked the film slightly more than I did. The protagonists here are just so emotionally inarticulate, and one moment that seems perfect and frustratingly true to life but then the next moment it seems like maybe the script is just frustratingly unformed. And when the two main boys do occasionally say something — whether by word or gesture — it often feels arbitrary and, yes, clumsy. But, again, that's very much true to the world of these characters and therefore hard to fault; but it's not always interesting, necessarily. Not that I was ever bored — this film very much meets the "three good scenes and no bad ones" standard — it's just that the minimalism didn't always resonate and at times felt more like a sketch. Hashiguchi's followup film,
Like Grains of Sand, fine-tunes a lot of the elements of this earlier movie but without losing any of that heartfelt clumsiness. I think it's a much better film myself, but I bet quite a few people prefer the more raw and oblique filmmaking of
The Slight Fever of a 20-Year-Old.
edit: It's a day later, and I find myself wanting to revisit this film already. Hmm.
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