Author Topic: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts  (Read 561628 times)

ProperCharlie

  • Member
  • **
  • Posts: 287
  • Am I right sir? Ithangyou.
Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #2360 on: April 06, 2017, 05:09:14 AM »
Qiu yue (Clara Law, 1992) aka Autumn Moon



Round 1 review by Bill Thompson
Round 2 review by Beavermoose
Round 3 review by Jared
Round 3 resurrection review by pixote

A Japanese tourist in Hong Kong has itemised his purchases while on holiday seeking meaning (or something) through some sort of numerological arrangement of receipts all filmed on his new VHS camera.   He meets a schoolgirl who has been left behind while the vast majority of the rest of Hong Kong have emigrated prior to the handover in China in 1997.  Together they seek to resolve the mysteries that plague them.

The two leads in this film speak different languages, only able to communicate with each other through broken English.  They have different ideas about those words as well.  Just what is an authentically Hong Kong restaurant?  This language barrier persists through the film.  It makes the conversation pained and slow, but they persevere.  The viewer has to persevere as well.  It doesn’t help that the lead characters both appear to somewhat stereotypical initially.  The Japanese tourist happy to say exactly what he bought and how much he paid, and to treat the women he meets similarly.  The Hong Kong school girl coming-of-age, and learning about boys and love.  Both characters do develop over the course of the film, but for the first twenty minutes or so, this is a tough watch.

Part of the reason for that is the cinematography.   In the absence of characters to get your teeth into, you might hope for something nice to look at.  Here though Hong Kong is presented as a bizarrely empty, washed-out, brutalist nightmare of a place.  It looks like an abandoned ant nest where all the residents have discovered the picnic of which all ants dream, and disappeared to party.  This fits with the ideas that are being developed.  Characters who are isolated or abandoned, and the idea of migration. Here it seems as if everyone from Hong Kong has already departed, leaving the two leads behind almost alone.  It’s a 1990s Hong Kong preserved in aspic. One of the most crowded places on earth rendered as a deserted maze of pavements, towers and rooms.  It’s odd to say then that Hong Kong itself serves as the third main character in this film.  In much the same way that Vienna interacts with the leads in ‘Before Sunrise’ in a romantic fug, and Tokyo inspires awe and befuddlement in ‘Lost in Translation’, here Hong Kong’s austere and impersonal  façade forces the leads to seek sanctuary inside, or in one case in some sort of sewer or underground water feature, to escape the sense overbearing alienation. 

It’s audacious cinematography in such a setting, yet this film is neither as chaste nor romantic as either ‘Before Sunrise’ or ‘Lost in Translation’.  The audacity continues with the sex scenes and the bulk of the film feels cold and sterile.  Emotions are not welcome there and have to be hidden.  The sex is similar but given the repression all around, it comes as something as a release for those both on and off-screen.  It’s forceful nature, graphic physicality and life-affirming energy contrasts with just about everything else in the film.   They shine a light into the turmoil within.

There’s something else going on here and that I think guides the director’s focus on the brutal architecture and drives the narrative towards its distinctly unsatisfying resolution.  Of the two-leads, one is constantly looking at the past, Tokio the tourist, while Wai, the student, is only looking forward to her life away from Hong Kong in the cold of Canada.  Neither is reflecting on the past or future with much pleasure or optimism.  When they first meet, there’s a connection, but it isn’t exactly clear what that might be.  In both cases, they are busy repressing the desires and emotions that drive them, and are unable to fully express  or know their own fears or sorrows.   Both are out of kilter with the world and their lives.  All very Koyaanisqatsi.  The distinctly Chinese solution to all of this are the Taoist concepts of living in the moment, living harmoniously with the universe and ‘naturalness’, that is returning to a state of simplicity. 

Both characters reach their quiet epiphanies and the film is all looking set for some sort of resolution, but this doesn’t seem to happen.  Or at least it didn’t in my subtitles.  Instead, they share the suddenly revealed connection and their new-found enjoyment of living in the now, having reset their fears in the light of their new perspective, and do so with the traditional cinematic conceit of the silently shared moment of understanding while watching fireworks near a stretch of water.  Their concerns are dispelled completely.  It’s all a bit ‘And they all lived happily ever after’ only with added humility in the light of self-gained knowledge.  Maybe it’s hard for my non-culturally collinear mind to appreciate.  It’s a deliberately quiet resolution, but perhaps too quiet; I found it all a bit too quick, clean and simple.  Like the concluding captain’s log at the end of an original Star Trek, only with less exposition, but just as much moral certainty.

So, yes, I liked this for lots of reasons, but it left me feeling alienated and a little abandoned by the director.  Lots of words there.  Probably indicative of how long it took me to process the film.

Chun gwong cha sit (Wong Kar-Wai, 1997) aka Happy Together



Round 1 review by Clovis8
Round 2 review by Bondo
Round 2 resurrection review by pixote
Round 3 review by BlueVoid

 
A pair of lovers has embarked on a quest to find both a waterfall and the thing that keeps them together.  In a strange land, how will they both survive their joint journey of discovery?  Will there be dancing and sticky rice?

This shares much with Autumn Moon and yet is so different.  Again, it's a hard start, but for a different reason.  The two leads are both very, very hard to like.  They argue.  They're childish.  They're reckless.  Yes, they're in love, or at least they were, but now the embers of that love and a lampshade are all that is holding them together.   We are voyeurs of a particularly messy break-up that's pretty much broken up already.  There is sex, and there is love with that sex, but it's not enough.   The first reel is unpleasant.  You really don't want to know these angry, selfish men.  I wanted to leave the screen and go home.  Going home is exactly what at least one them wants to do as well, only they're in Argentina without enough money for a return ticket and a spontaneously hedonistic lifestyle to maintain.  They can't go home nor escape each other.  They are aliens in a land that doesn't understand them and in which they don't fit in.  They are unwilling immigrants on what might as well be another planet.

Then there are the major differences, starting with the cinematography.  Happy Together is occasionally black and white (for remembered events), but mostly a molten kaleidoscope of colour, filmed on DV (I think).  There is overexposure, saturation, shooting directly into the sun.  A bed-sitting room that is so colourful it may have been production designed to test the colour-resolution limits of the camera technology being used.   There is nothing at all austere about the visuals.  I get the sense of a director testing a new way of film-making to see if he likes it, although Wong Kar-Wai has always enjoyed a vivid palate.

The resolution is, in my eyes, more authentically human and satisfying than Autumn Moon’s.  Perhaps it’s a more regularly-trodden narrative path.  Perhaps it’s more rooted in the tango than the Tao.  One major stand-out in Happy Together is the acting of both Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung.  They breathe life into the characters, their situation, their evolving emotions.  Tony Leung spends large chunks of the film staring into space with the look of a dog who's lost his master and has turned up at the same spot every day for the past eight years hoping his for return, before stoically getting on with his job as bouncer at a bar every evening, thinking about how he's going to bite his master's ankle as hard has he can when he gets back. 

These two films have a lot in common.  Both deal with isolation, the experience of migration, abandonment and dislocation.  The main characters are all in turmoil below the surface, unable at least initially, to communicate, identify or even be aware of their turbulent feelings.  Those feelings erupt only in elliptical tangents that given a window into the characters.  Both of these films are hard starters and have unsympathetic even dislikeable characters as protagonists.  I found the first quarter of an hour of both films to be tough-going, with both eventually worth that effort.  Both make use of very interesting choices of cinematography and production design that do connect with the action and characters. 


A difficult choice between two similar films and as both have already been resurrected, the loser is definitely out of the bracket, no third chances. I have to jump on the Wong-Kar Wai bandwagon;  Happy Together progresses with a comforting bowl of sticky rice.  Autumn Moon is good, but ultimately it’s the acting, direction and writing of the relationship between the two leads in Happy Together and the authenticity of its resolution that wins it.  Clara Law is an interesting director who I had previously not been aware of.  I look forward to seeing more of her work.

« Last Edit: September 26, 2017, 04:02:07 AM by ProperCharlie »

Teproc

  • Elite Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 3529
Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #2361 on: April 06, 2017, 06:31:15 AM »
The reviews make the loser sound more interesting to me, but that's how it goes. Great write-ups, and hopefully this will pick up again.
Legend: All-Time Favorite | Great  |  Very Good  |  Good  |  Poor  |  Bad

Letterbox'd

BlueVoid

  • Elite Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 1841
    • Movie Fodder
Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #2362 on: April 06, 2017, 09:52:25 PM »
And Happy Together limps onward. Nice writeups PC! Let's get this thing moving again!
Former blog on FlickChart: The Depths of Obscurity
Letterboxd 
iCM
Twitter

Beavermoose

  • Godfather
  • *****
  • Posts: 5006
  • Samsonite! I was way off!
Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #2363 on: April 25, 2017, 06:22:54 PM »

A Dedicated Life
I'd seen The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On about 6 years ago for a MDC and according to my review I found Kenzo Okuzaki's mission enthralling but didn't really like him. This movie has arguably a more interesting yet equally unlikable character at the center of it but Mitsuharu Inoue lacks the "mission" and drive that makes Emperor so interesting. A Dedicated Life is fine. I enjoyed it for a little while but at 2h30 it had lost most of my attention by the end.


Princess Mononoke
Miyazaki really refines his storytelling as his filmography progresses and Mononoke is the first time he has a story of such epic scale. It it more adult than his earlier movies and the fantasy elements at the center of it allows him to really push the animation style and his crazy imagination to the next level. It isn't entirely subtle in it's thematic elements but the ethical shades of grey give the movie much more depth than traditional children's animated films. It is often considered one of his best movies and for a director who is arguably the best animation director of all time it is easy to see where this verdict is going.

Mononoke moves on.
« Last Edit: May 08, 2017, 09:37:35 PM by Beavermoose »

smirnoff

  • Objectively Awesome
  • ******
  • Posts: 26251
    • smirnoff's Top 100
Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #2364 on: April 25, 2017, 08:34:17 PM »
Oh good.

Teproc

  • Elite Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 3529
Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #2365 on: April 26, 2017, 06:06:06 AM »
<=
Legend: All-Time Favorite | Great  |  Very Good  |  Good  |  Poor  |  Bad

Letterbox'd

Beavermoose

  • Godfather
  • *****
  • Posts: 5006
  • Samsonite! I was way off!
Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #2366 on: May 08, 2017, 09:38:01 PM »

A Dedicated Life
I'd seen The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On about 6 years ago for a MDC and according to my review I found Kenzo Okuzaki's mission enthralling but didn't really like him. This movie has arguably a more interesting yet equally unlikable character at the center of it but Mitsuharu Inoue lacks the "mission" and drive that makes Emperor so interesting. A Dedicated Life is fine. I enjoyed it for a little while but at 2h30 it had lost most of my attention by the end.


Princess Mononoke
Miyazaki really refines his storytelling as his filmography progresses and Mononoke is the first time he has a story of such epic scale. It it more adult than his earlier movies and the fantasy elements at the center of it allows him to really push the animation style and his crazy imagination to the next level. It isn't entirely subtle in it's thematic elements but the ethical shades of grey give the movie much more depth than traditional children's animated films. It is often considered one of his best movies and for a director who is arguably the best animation director of all time it is easy to see where this verdict is going.

Mononoke moves on.

BlueVoid

  • Elite Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 1841
    • Movie Fodder
Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #2367 on: May 09, 2017, 02:27:24 PM »
Nicely done BeaverMoose! Not a surprise, I couldn't imagine Princess Mononoke not going forward.
Former blog on FlickChart: The Depths of Obscurity
Letterboxd 
iCM
Twitter

roujin

  • Objectively Awesome
  • ******
  • Posts: 15508
  • it's all research
Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #2368 on: May 26, 2017, 11:13:20 AM »
Chungking Express (Wong Kar Wai, 1994)

Made in a two-month down period while shooting Ashes of Time, Wong's film evinces all the hallmarks of a quickly thrown-together production: the shots are mostly completely hand-held, the story seems made up on the spot, and all it feels patched together with music and voice-over. That this film is a masterpiece then is something of an accident. But it is. Made up of a series of repetitive encounters and motifs (girl bumps into boy, girl cleans apartment, music heard on the soundtrack for the 5th time, phone call to a lover), Chungking Express captures perfectly the feeling of young people in a big city, passing each other by, falling in love, the timing never right. Until it is.

Siao Yu (Sylvia Chang, 1995)

This tells the story of an immigrant woman marrying a New York guy in order to get a green card. But instead of Wedding Banquet Sundance drama, this is disappointment and depressing apartments. The color scheme is a bummer. But Chang makes the spaces lived in, the mess of it all palpable, and the film's final moments feel earned after spending all those moments in there.

Wong moves on.
« Last Edit: June 13, 2017, 10:57:31 AM by roujin »

Sam the Cinema Snob

  • Objectively Awesome
  • ******
  • Posts: 26795
Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #2369 on: May 26, 2017, 11:20:13 AM »
Not surprising at all.

 

love