Author Topic: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts  (Read 561528 times)

pixote

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #1120 on: June 11, 2010, 07:51:45 PM »
Glad you discovered another great film in this bracket, Bondo.  And to think how reluctant you were to join in...

I hope you enjoy Nobody Knows and Still Walking as much as After Life (or Still Life, as you called it once).  :)

I'm very intrigued by Moonlight Boy.  "Taiwanese Sixth Sense" sounds must-see, even if it doesn't quite live up to expectations.

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Bondo

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #1121 on: June 11, 2010, 08:12:40 PM »
The Eye>Sixth Sense>Moonlight Boy. Hong Kong FTW I guess.

But yeah, I was coming off a bad spell with Asian cinema in my 200X marathon but I'm glad I stuck with it, my three pairs for this bracket have far exceeded my 5 80s bracket pairs, and without being necessarily "my type" of film. Both of them are pretty quiet stories, they just do it so much better than Yi Yi.
« Last Edit: June 11, 2010, 08:15:04 PM by Bondo »

pixote

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #1122 on: June 11, 2010, 08:24:28 PM »
Round One Resurrection Forecast, Films 36 - 40


Metade Fumaca (Kam-Hung Yip, 1999)
Lost to Peppermint Candy (verdict by roujin)
If nothing else, the soundtrack for Metade Fumaca should probably make it to the fourth round of our 1990s Far East Soundtracks Bracket. It's really nice. I agree with roujin about the other good elements here, too — the performances, the cinematography, the quirky sensibility, etc. Nicholas Tse, in an early role, does a fine job of acting cool of looking pretty — but nowhere near as pretty or cool as Shu Qi in her brief, typecast role as Unobtainable Ideal. But the standout in the cast for me was Sandra Ng Kwan Yue, who, it turns out, is married to Peter Chan, director of Comrades, Almost a Love Story, which features a great supporting turn by Eric Tsang, the star of Metade Fumaca. It's all connected! Anyway, the main narrative of this film does feel pretty half-baked, but the film never really takes that narrative very seriously, so I didn't find that too be as big a flaw as roujin did. The movie is much more interested in its many non sequiturs, like the scene of the two leads sitting under a piano in the rain, having a heart-to-heart conversation (see roujin's verdict for a screenshot); or the moment where a gang rumble gets preempted by a meteor shower, with all the prospective combatants looking up to the night sky in shared joy. All told, it seemed to me to be the ideal round one film, along the lines of Suicide Bus and Postman Blues — films that are good enough to be worth a look (and might have surprised the right viewer) but not necessarily good enough to advance to round two.



An Affair (Je-yong Lee, 1998)
Lost to Ley Lines (verdict by roujin)
An impressive film. Movies this innocuous don't usually piss me off so much. But An Affair is just insultingly bland and uncreative, with a script as simple as its title. It's like it wants to be Red Shoe Diaries redone as a K-drama, so in between the scattered sex scenes we have to suffer through long stretches of the two protagonists staring off in different directions, with one of them in the foreground, the other slightly out of focus in the background — just so we know we're watching art and not softcore porn. The plot turns, such as they are, are all so generic, it almost feels like satire. To add a bit of conflict, the filmmakers just have the cuckolded husband randomly tell his wife — and I'm paraphrasing, maybe — "Oh, that guy you're sleeping with behind my back that I don't know about yet, I invited him over for dinner because that will theoretically make for a tense scene between the three of us, okay?" That's the script firing on all cylinders. After roujin posted his verdict, I wrote, "Your review of the totally boring-sounding The Affair makes me think you would have bumped Sense and Sensibility up a star rating if you'd watched an Asian dub of it. Or maybe it was the sex." The thing is, the sex here isn't even that hot — certainly not compared to the opening of Happy End. And, hell, even the first five minutes of I Like You, I Like You Very Much had better plotting. Clearly roujin is a horrible person.



Give It All (Itsumichi Isomura, 1998)
Lost to Not One Less (verdict by Melvil)
Just look at that screenshot. It's The Virgin Suicides meets The Sandlot! Okay, maybe not so much. I actually already reviewed this movie (without having seen it) right after Melvil posted his verdict, and I pretty much stand by what I wrote there. The lack of character development was a huge obstacle to my engagement. The six girls on the crew team are barely distinguishable from each other. I'm curious if that's true in the source novel as well, or if the filmmakers were just more interested in oars cutting through water, a general atmosphere of nostalgia, and the legs of young girls (Etsuko's cut-off jeans were sweet, it's true). It looks and feels like a good movie (the cinematography is quite nice, and I really liked the color palette, which reminded a lot of Tokyo Biyori's), but I just couldn't get invested at all. Melvil liked this film a fair amount more than I did. It pretty much much lost me at the script-by-numbers frame device prologue.



The Scent of Green Papaya (Anh Hung Tran, 1993)
Lost to Picture Bride (verdict by Thor)
I'm not sure what to do with this one. Going into it, I was very mindful of Thor's having labeled it "[o]ne of the most potent examples of arthouse ponce ever perpetrated", so I a little on the defensive the whole time. It is definitely a very good looking film (especially once I tracked down a unbrightened copy with the correct aspect ratio), showcasing great set design and cinematography. A lot of reviews remark that it's slow and minimalistic and lacks tension, but I was engaged the whole time, so screw those guys. The child's-eye perspective of the bulk of the film was occasionally a bit precious and overly familiar (for some reason I kept thinking of Fanny and Alexander, even though my memories of that film are completely hazy), but it's still all very pleasant, to borrow Thor's description. The final third ("ten years later") suffers from being an overly obvious Cinderella tale. I can almost understand why it annoyed Thor so much, but I found that the aesthetics were interesting enough to overcome the thematic and narrative flaws. The piano score, which is a virtue of the film throughout, is especially well used at this point, taking over the soundtrack as the prospective lovers move around each other in silence. The Buddhist implications of all this were lost on me, but, regardless, it's an entertainingly pretty film, troubling in a few respects and possibly in need of another look. Arthouse ponce!



Young and Dangerous (Andrew Lau, 1996)
Lost to Swallowtail Butterfly (verdict by roujin)
Not much to add to roujin's verdict here. He perfectly summed up Young and Dangerous when he wrote, "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." It's very watchable and reasonably fun — but very slight (thematically, narratively, visually, viscerally, what have you). The handheld camerawork keeps things lively, I guess, but the strobe effect during a couple of the action scenes is just stupid. Ekin Cheng (aka Dior Cheng) is a really bland lead, the kind of actor who'd be killed off in the first season of a WB drama when the writers realize that his prettiness isn't enough to make him telegenic. Jordan Chan is so much better as the sidekick Chicken, stealing every scene he's in — except when Simon Yam shows up briefly and makes everyone else look like an extra. Francis Ng has fun with his role as the antagonist Ugly Kwan; the performance didn't quite work for me but points for trying. Anyway, yeah, this was way better than Fudoh: The Next Generation and is worth a look, if you're interested in Hong Kong cinema — but, like Metade Fumaca, it's a nice round one film, not necessarily a round two film.

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« Last Edit: June 12, 2010, 02:05:08 AM by pixote »
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roujin

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #1123 on: June 11, 2010, 09:13:45 PM »
Yay, validation!

I wasn't really all that nice to An Affair (at least, I don't really remember it all that fondly). I did say that it reeked of "Korean Drama aesthetics," which is an affectionate insult, at best.

pixote

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #1124 on: June 12, 2010, 02:05:48 AM »
I wasn't really all that nice to An Affair (at least, I don't really remember it all that fondly). I did say that it reeked of "Korean Drama aesthetics," which is an affectionate insult, at best.

You were nicer to it than to Sense & Sensibility. Problematic!

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Verite

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #1125 on: June 12, 2010, 03:02:27 PM »
The other film in my matchup is Siao Yu.  My write-up for that is coming in a few days as is my verdict.

So, my library's copy is missing from the shelf.  And currently I'm not a Netflix subscriber.  Sorry!  Could you put "Winner of The Personals-Siao Yu matchup (TBD)" in the next round bracket just in case I can't get to it by the deadline?
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pixote

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #1126 on: June 12, 2010, 04:27:54 PM »
The other film in my matchup is Siao Yu.  My write-up for that is coming in a few days as is my verdict.

So, my library's copy is missing from the shelf.  And currently I'm not a Netflix subscriber.  Sorry!  Could you put "Winner of The Personals-Siao Yu matchup (TBD)" in the next round bracket just in case I can't get to it by the deadline?

Yeah, we'll figure something out.  :)

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Melvil

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #1127 on: June 13, 2010, 01:21:07 PM »
Very cool sounding matchup, Bondo. After Life sounds pretty awesome, I love the concept.

Melvil liked this film a fair amount more than I did. It pretty much much lost me at the script-by-numbers frame device prologue.

That's fair. Admittedly I'm a sucker for that style of overt nostalgia. :)

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #1128 on: June 14, 2010, 02:12:06 AM »
My matchup was Hou Hsiao-hsien's The Puppetmaster vs. Chen Kaige's Life on a String.  One's a masterpiece, the other is not as bad as I make it sound.

The Puppetmaster - The life of a puppeteer parallels the history of Taiwan during the first half of the 20th century, when it was run by Japan.  Events from Li Tianlu's life are enacted in Hou's unique style (long, distant shots on a constant plane with little camera movement) interspersed with Li himself telling stories about his life, sometimes as narration, sometimes as on-screen interview.  Li's stories are more or less related to what is about to be dramatized, more often it explains what we had just seen.  It's fascinating for its whole 2 1/2 hours, one of the most interesting approaches to the biopic genre I've seen; it'd make a great double feature with another great biopic in this bracket, Stanley Kwan's Centre Stage.  The DVD is cropped to 1.33, which sucks, but the movie still looks pretty great and it seems like most of the pertinent information (plot-wise) is shown, what we don't get is the full artistry of Hou's compositions.

Life on a String - A old blind banjo player and his young blind apprentice wander the countryside, waiting for the old man to break his 1000th string so he can open his banjo and find the cure to his blindness (seriously).  Stopping off in the desert, the young one hooks up with a local girl while the old man breaks up a gang fight by singing a song that's got terrible lyrics by even Chinese pop standards.  Written by Chen himself, the song's about why can't we see that we're all brothers, etc, pounding that metaphor like a mediocre 8th grade creative writing student.  Visually, Chen makes nice use of the desolate landscapes and cool locations.  But all the drama is undone by the silliness of the plot and bluntness of the metaphors.  After watching this, I read Jonathan Rosenbaum's capsule to see why he liked it.  My only guess is the version he saw didn't translate the dialogue and lyrics correctly.

Hou over Chen easily.
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pixote

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #1129 on: June 14, 2010, 11:01:42 AM »
Glad to hear that The Puppetmaster overcomes Fox Lorber's presentational obstacles.  Does it sneak into the top ten for 1993?

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