Author Topic: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts  (Read 561674 times)

Teproc

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #2490 on: May 16, 2018, 07:27:30 AM »


Omohide poro poro / Only Yesterday
(Isao Takahata, 1991)
Round 1 review by worm@work
Round 2 review by ProperCharlie
Round 3 review by Melvil
Round 4 review by oldkid
Round 4 resurrection by pixote
Round 5 review by smirnoff

               VS               


Heung Gong jai jo / Made in Hong Kong
(Fruit Chan, 1997)
Round 1 review by roujin
Round 2 review by flieger
Round 3 review by Jared
Round 3 resurrection by pixote
Round 4 review by BlueVoid
Round 5 review by smirnoff




Only Yesterday


I don't know what it is with Takahata, but this is the third film out of three where he's made me cry (which is relevant to me because I'm not a big crier when it comes to movies). Made sense in Grave of the Fireflies obviously, but Kaguya and this ? What is it exactly that I find so affecting in the way he depicts children ? I didn't grow up in Japan, I was never particularly fascinated with the countryside, and while we're at it I wasn't a girl. Obviously that doesn't mean I should be surprised that great filmmakers can make me feel deeply about experiences that aren't mine (cinema being a "machine that generates empathy" and whatnot), but still, I wonder what it is that makes him (and Miyazaki, whose My Neighbour Totoro in particular feels like it could have Takahata's name on it as well) so special for me. Ghibli's approach to childhood in general gets at something that I don't find in any other film, or any other medium for that matter, and I still struggle to define exactly what it is.

All of which is a long way of saying I fell for this film, hard. The memories are obviously the entry point, and apparently the whole basis (as in source material) for the film, and they have this random quality that true memories have: it's not the big stuff... well sometimes it is (like the only time her father slapped her or a childhood crush), but sometimes it's just the excitment of tasting an actual pineapple and forcing yourself to like it to overcome the disappointment, or struggling with math in school (to say I can relate to that would be an understatement), or that little handwave in the school play, or all the school boys freaking out about the concept of periods... I guess only the pineapple one really qualifies as really small, but they're not obvious stuff either, they're specific and somewhat random. The presense of diegetic music in the background for many of these scenes also adds to the Proustian feeling of it all. Takahata differenciating the memories from the framing narrative with a style closer to watercolor with white backgrounds which fits the idea memory rather well: a very clear picture in a somewhat vague setting. The current-day (well, 1980s) part of it is much more naturalistic, especially with how the faces of the main characters are animated, resembling actual faces more than most Japanese animation (Ghibli included).

There's still plenty of romanticism to be found in the adult Takeo part of it though, with the countryside being depicted idyllically, though I don't think Takahata is as naive as he may seem regarding that traditional ideal of rural Japan. The way the ending works reminds of Murnau's The Last Laugh more than a typical happy ending: by placing it in the credits, Takahata undercuts it slightly and I think implies that both endings would be just as valid: I don't see an uncritical, nostalgic message here, urging Japanese people to return to farming or something. I don't know that he's as much of a humanist as Miyazaki is, but he's too frank about the dangers of traditional Japanese society (familial authority goes from not great to terrible in what I've seen of his films so far) to be that reactionary.

Have I mentioned that it's gorgeous ? Well, now I have. Looking at the past reviews here, I get how oldkid and smirnoff were underwhelmed, it is a bit long for a slice-of-life story, and though I don't agree with pixote that Takahata doesn't use animation to its full potential here (again: the watercolor-ness of the memories plus a few touches like the obligatory Ghibli flight scene pix mentions and a few other anime-like moments), I do share part of his sentiment in that it feels like film that happens to be animated and could very easily have been live action, maybe because there's no obvious need for a layer between story and audience (like in Grave of the Fireflies) and no fantasy element at all. But worm@work's review is the one I relate to the most, and it highlights of cool this whole bracket thing is: it taking so much time has certainly been frustrating (especially for pix and the others who've been there since the beginning) but it feels very appropriate to this film in particular to be part of this now decade-long exercise in communal film appreciation.



Made in Hong Kong


Hong Kong's version of A bout de souffle/Breathless, with bits of Jules et Jim in there too. Putting this film in the context of the Hong Kong handover greatly helped me appreciate it, in that I was able to appreciate its excesses as coming from filmmakers - and, you know, people, who truly had no idea what the future held. In that context, exploring the disaffected youth that is naturally enclined to think that way in any context seems like an obvious move, and one that yields pretty interesting results.

Made in Hong Kong is not exactly a smooth experience: for every memorable shot (and there are a lot of of those), there is an amateurish scene with pretty poor acting, and as such it's not exactly as coherent as one could wish for, with moments standing out as impressive, bold achievments, but the connecting tissue of the story not working all that well. Those scenes are worth it though, particularly the scene in which our protagonist is taesked with killing someone: him hyping himself up, what eventually happens and the aftermath is more than enough to compensate the more questionable choices Fruit Chan makes, such as the whole last twenty minutes or so.

In the end, what stays with me is not so much the story or characters, but the environment. In a way that reminds me of the more frenetic bits in Chungking Express, Fruit conveys a very strong sense of place, of what the world looks like to a disillusioned teen in 1997 Hong Kong, with small moments of beauty such as their visit to the graveyard, or any time we're looking at the Hong Kong skyline. There's also an energy to the film that makes it easier to overlook its flaws for me: I'd rather be weirded out than bored, always.



Verdict: Only Yesterday moves on, obviously. Second film to make it to the Sweet 16: progress ! Now officially rooting for a Miyazaki v Takahata (RIP  :'() finals for this bracket.
« Last Edit: May 23, 2018, 02:26:43 PM by Teproc »
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BlueVoid

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #2491 on: May 17, 2018, 10:17:42 PM »
Nice writeups Teproc! Makes me very excited to watch Only Yesterday.
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oldkid

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #2492 on: May 23, 2018, 10:52:29 PM »
Excellent review of Only Yesterday.  I'm glad you appreciated it more than I, there is a lot of good to see in there.
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smirnoff

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #2493 on: May 24, 2018, 01:10:44 AM »
Loving these last two verdicts. :)

ProperCharlie

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #2494 on: June 06, 2018, 05:27:39 AM »
ワンダフルライフ/Wandafuru Raifu  (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 1998)
 aka After Life

 


 
Round 1 review by Bondo
Round 2 review by BlueVoid
Round 3 review by Beavermoose
Round 4 review by smirnoff

 

Some short-staying guests at a bureaucratic municipal facility have their memories probed by a small and slightly disinterested team of investigators including a new recruit.  Can they get the answers they need before the film-crew's marching-band finish their performance later in the week?

The conceit of this film is astonishing.  You're presented with a mystery.  Where are these people?  What's all that fog doing there?  Is this some form of care-home or hospital?  Those who are running it don't seem that organised or well-briefed.  They care yes, and there's a humility and gentleness about them but also a bureaucracy and occasional disregard for their jobs.  There's a hint of a procedural crime documentary like the Serial podcast.  The questions keep coming but the best you and they can do is shrug your shoulders and accept the uncertainty of it all.  The setting is mundane and the knitwear is Gen-X 90s indie.  Slowly it dawns on the guests why they're there, and the viewer what they're watching.  It should be melodramatic, daunting, overwhelmingly sad, but instead it's mundane,calm and bumbling.  All the foibles of management team meetings continue including sidelining female voices and stealing their ideas and minor insubordination among the ranks as rules are reinforced.

It's so profoundly human.  As part of the investigations, you see a series of interviews with the guests shot from the perspective of the interviewer.  This is not an interrogation, more a guided tour down the paths of memory akin to the punctuating scenes of couples re-living the beginnings of their relationships from When Harry Met Sally only with a zero-schmaltz rating.  People ramble, correct themselves, play with things they've found outside, cast doubt, smile, frown.  They recall wonder, awe, comfort, regret, pain, sadness and joy, and they do so seemingly completely naturally.  Miniature portraits made with carefully chosen words that sum up what it is to be alive.  I cried like a baby at the end of watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  I mean I literally bawled until someone hugged me.  Memory and me, well, we have a thing.  Films that press that particular button are set aside in a box only to be brought out when I genuinely need a hug.  This film is being added to that box.

Then there's the second part of the film, in which Kore-eda imagines a film-director's idea of heaven for film-directors, and as always there seem to be tight budgetary constraints.  The ramshackle approach to filming short sequences of life is endearing.  The crew and cast share the joy as they solve the problems in recreating the memories trawled up earlier.  Everyone works together to create something that will both live forever and yet will be seen once and disappear in the blink of an eye.  There is joy and acceptance in the face of shared grief.  The challenges they face go beyond blocking and cinematography.  How about recreating a hot day, breezes, particular emotional connections, the smell and taste of a particular portion of chicken rice?  And all of this has to get done in a day or so.  The Dogme rules are unrestrictive by comparison.

And I haven't even mentioned the B-plots of the small dramas unfolding within the investigating team and the mystery of who they are and why they're there.  That's a cherry on the cake.  Sorry, I'm still sobbing slightly while writing this up.  Even though going into it I knew what was going on, it still hit me like the softest, pillowed sledgehammer and knocked me flying.  This is the second time Kore-eda has does this to me.  My first experience of his films was Nobody Knows which utterly devastated me.

It all ends with us watching them, watching them and a harmonium plays a wheezy tune.  Smirnoff is correct in his write up.  It isn't a film of outbursts, there is so much catharsis, and you might expect more sentimentality.  It's not even nostalgic, a trap other directors might have fallen into.  The film doesn't require grander emotions. I'm perfectly, absurdly happy with its wistful, whimsical melancholy and a series of small wows.

OK yeah, so that was an experience - tough gig Tsai Ming-liang.  How're you going to follow that?


 
 
青少年哪吒/Qing shao nian nuo zha (Tsai Ming-liang, 1992)
 aka Rebels of the Neon God

 

 
Round 1 review by roujin
Round 2 review by Bill Thompson
Round 3 review by BlueVoid
Round 4 review by Jared

 
 
Hsiao Kang doesn't like the cramming school his parents have enrolled him in.  More generally, he's not particularly enamoured with anything about his life, his parents, the city, Taiwan or the world in general.  The future is a gaping chasm of isolation and despair.  Only the small thrills of petty crime and stalking can possibly offer him any hope.  Will anyone leave the door open for him again?

Malaise.  If you get your kicks from malaise, this film is for you.  It gets reviews mentioning its dreamlike qualities.  Its lack of connection to the world and the places and times its characters drift through are deliberately insubstantial.  Life is more vivid realised in 8-bit graphical depth and when a joystick is attached.  The most precious things are the circuit boards that generate that alternate, simple, colourful landscape.  Outside of that, life holds no promise; it's better to exist in the dream.
 
Except this film isn't dreamlike at all.  It's the exact opposite of dreamlike.  This is insomnia.  Lives lived in the darkness, alone and with dawn far, far away.  It's those times when you're restless in bed with only your Snoopy pillow to keep you company knowing that when the morning finally arrives, you're only going to feel more shitty.  The long drift to sunlight that never arrives, fatigued to the point of meaninglessness.  Teenage listless weltschmerz.

This isn't melancholic either.  Melancholy may be akin to being trapped in a deep pit, with no way out and with nothing to anticipate and perhaps you don't really care whether you do escape or what's going on outside.  But with melancholy you're bathed in the pure pale while light of knowledge and calm.  This is malaise.  The grey-blues.  Emphasised by director Tsai Ming-liang filming at least two hours after the magic hour like a jet-lagged Malick who can't be bothered to adjust his watch.   

If that all sounds somewhat alienating and grim, well, that's kind of the point.  Perhaps a different way of describing this would be like Bill Forsythe directing a live action Akira in which the apocalypse never happens and all the characters just stand round going "nnnrrrrggggnnngggg" or shouting each others' name.  Gregory's Girl with vandalised mopeds or Comfort and Joy with blocked drains and no ice cream.  It's well acted and directed.  The world it conjures is well-realised and complete.  The journey of the lead is quietly and beautifully cathartic.  This film lives with you afterwards as a sensation - perhaps most akin to The Scent of Green Papaya than any other film in this bracket I've seen yet in that regard - but that sensation is one of bathing in a deep, cloying mixture of tiredness and inertia to the point you almost want to cry (and not in a good way).
 
 Verdict
 This may not come as a shock to you, but I'm putting through After Life and I'll be cheering it through this bracket. Over to you Sam.
« Last Edit: June 06, 2018, 09:00:18 AM by ProperCharlie »

Teproc

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #2495 on: June 06, 2018, 11:29:49 AM »
Yeah, both of those sound pretty great really. Nice reviews Charlie !
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smirnoff

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #2496 on: June 07, 2018, 11:13:06 PM »
You're a Good Man, ProperCharlie Brown :)

pixote

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #2497 on: June 14, 2018, 10:24:52 PM »
Round Five Matchup



Vive L'Amour (Tsai Ming-liang, 1994)
Won over Suicide Bus (verdict by edgar00)
Won over Adrenaline Drive (verdict by BlueVoid)
Won over Made in Hong Kong (verdict by Jared)
Won over Woman Sesame Oil Maker (verdict by PeacefulAnarchy)

A full decade ago, I excitedly hit play on Tsai's Goodbye, Dragon Inn. By the half hour mark, my excitement had turned to a resentful disappointment that only worsened as the film slogged along. I was in no rush to watch another Tsai film after that (despite the glimmer of hope I saw in The Skywalk Is Gone on that same day). Once this bracket started up a few months later, I was content to wait until the resurrection process prodded me to give Tsai another go. I missed my one chance in the first round when time constraints forced me to resurrect The River sight-unseen. After that, Tsai's other three films went undefeated for the next ten years.

That backstory factors into why it's taken me so long to get to this verdict; despite my undying love for this bracket, I never found myself in the right mood to risk another Goodbye, Dragon Inn experience. There were at least a half dozen times I stared at Vive L'Amour on my Amazon Prime playilst, realized my trepidation was far too great, and watched something else instead. This all seems like a prelude to my saying that Vive L'Amour turned out to be my new favorite film of all time; or even more of a trial than my previous Tsai feature. Not quite.

Through the film's first five minutes, I was ready to put it in my Top 100 — which was perhaps just an over-correction for my low expectations for the movie. It is a fantastic opening, though, especially the shot captured above, which is part of the best fourth-wall break I've seen in a very long time. The camera shows us the security mirror in the grocery store as Lee Kang-sheng's character (Hsiao-Kang) approaches that corner. By the time he stops to look at his own reflection, the frame of the mirror is no longer visible, and it's as if he's caught us watching him. He's shown in the previous scene to be somewhat of a shifty character (having cautiously stolen a key left in an apartment door), so there's context to his being nervous about being watched — not by us but by store security. Before we can fully appreciate that ambiguity, Hsiao-Kang starts styling his hair, an action which completely shifts the meaning of his gaze: he's actually looking at himself. Tsai, who's good at veering in these unexpected directions, encourages us return to our normal cinematic voyeurism. A second after we drop our guard, however, Hsiao-Kang's stare hardens, seeming perhaps more accusatory, and the effect is properly unsettling. It's a wonderful bit of self-reflexive playfulness, which, in another twist, is later revealed to be rooted in the character's deep self-loathing.

After that scene, the movie introduces its two other main characters, and things go a bit off the rails. PeacefulAnarchy was kind enough to pre-plagiarize me in his verdict: "It grabbed me at the start, but then throughout the film kept letting me go before grabbing me again." That might even undersell just how drastically the movie veers between moments of (comedic and dramatic) brilliance and long stretches of nothingness. (The first twenty or so minutes don't even have dialogue, but that's not what makes them feel so empty.) It's almost as if Tsai's strategy is to starve the audience of any sort engagement and then slip them a delicious morsel that will seem all the more sweet following the deprivation. And, damn him, it kind of works.

Call Me by Your Name echoes two very memorable moments from Tsai's film, and I'm not sure if that's a mere coincidence. In fact, were it not anachronistic, you might think Vive L'Amour was parodying the other film in both cases. When Hsiao-Kang starts carving a hole in a piece of fruit, you're like, "Heh, I know where this is going!" But, again, Tsai has a knack for comedic misdirection and reversals, and that one is particularly priceless. The final shot contains the other echo, though Vive L'Amour's is more harsh and more of a trial than Call Me by Your Name's, featuring an ebb-and-flow of viewer reaction reminiscent of the earlier shot with the security mirror.

I haven't yet mentioned the film's best scene (two adjacent scenes, really), partly because I've droned on long enough already and partly because I want to avoid even the slightest hint of spoilers in a film that relies on a small handful of surprises to enliven the tedium of the urban alienation it embodies. But for those who've seen the film, I'm of course talking about the scene from this spoiler-ish screenshot along with the scene it immediately follows. The mix of comedy and tragedy in that culmination of underlying emotional pain and desperation is pretty special.





Hana-bi  (Kitano Takeshi, 1997)
Won over Labyrinth of Dreams (verdict by Gobman)
Won over God of Gamblers 2 (verdict by tinyholidays)
Won over Peppermint Candy (verdict by Bondo)
Won over Eagle Shooting Heroes (verdict by BlueVoid)

My history with Kitano is somewhat the opposite of with Tsai. Sonatine proved a very favorable introduction long ago (I don't remember it at all) and left me anxious to see more — with Hani-bi at the top of the list. But I just never got around to seeing any more of his films, not until they started falling into the resurrection queue. Kikujiro was in the very first batch of films I watched for this bracket, and it was a disaster. Kids Return proved slightly better in the third round but still not quite good, and then last round A Scene at the Sea got Kitano back into thumbs-up territory, if only barely.

None of those other bracket experiences diminished my excitement to at long last watch Hani-bi (which apparently we agreed to stop calling Fireworks at some point), especially since it seemed like it'd be more in the Sonatine mold (whatever that is) than those other movies. That was a poor assumption on my part because Hana-bi reflects all four of those other movies in equal measure: the whimsical yakuza cool of Sonatine; the familiar melancholy of Kids Return; the meditation on beauty of A Scene at the Sea; and the tone-deaf mawkishness of Kikujiro.

I amused myself during Hani-bi's first act with the notion that Kitano directed like a director who hated his screenwriter, which is of course funny since he filled both roles. Some of the early exposition is so poorly handled that I can imagine his saying, "I know this sucks; let's just get through it as fast as we can." The elliptical editing — which bothered most brackets viewers of the film, me included — also seemed like a flailing attempt to distract from the script's shortcomings.

When the film settles down for its second act, it's somewhat shocking to discover that Hana-bi is neither a cop film nor a yakuza film but rather another in a series of films Japan made in the 90s (Artists in Wonderland, The Last Dance, Suicide Bus) about how the sick, elderly, and disabled are not, in fact, worthless and need not necessarily kill themselves. I'm exaggerating a bit, but Artists in Wonderland really would have been the perfect third round opponent for Kitano's film — for the shared thematic material, haphazard editing, and even the similar screenshots. Kitano's film likely would have breezed through that matchup, but the two movies could really have informed each other in the process.

If Kitano, as a director, seems to show disdain for his screenwriter, he shows nothing less than adoration for the artist who did the paintings for the film, allowing his camera to linger over each canvas in full appreciation. Of course, he again filled both roles, so there's some enjoyable narcissism inherent in those choices. In his defense, though, the paintings are cool and fit the film well, so he's right to be proud of them.

My favorite comment from the previous verdicts comes from tinyholidays, who remarked on Joe Hisaishi's score, "The soundtrack suggests a 'very special episode' vibe." So true. Occasionally it works to good effect, with the earnestness of the music acting as counterpoint to the narrative's mix of whimsicality and melancholia; but more often it's just too much.



Verdict: There's suspense here for me because, as I write this, I still have yet to read the masked text in Teproc's verdict. I suspect we're in agreement, because I nodded my head in agreement at most everything in his reviews. I didn't sense any remarkable homoeroticism in the violence of Kitano's film; it seemed rather par for the course in this kind of male-centric film where the few female characters are kept largely mute; and I wasn't bothered as much by the film's ending. But I, too, liked Kitano's screen presence (though I kept having to remind myself that it wasn't just Harvey Keitel doing a bit); and I had a similar thought about how Hisaishi's music seems somehow better suited for animated films; and I found myself fighting boredom with Tsai's film, which is truly "both immersive and hard to focus on" (great description!); and I laughed out loud when an arm emerged from under the bed. So as I hit Post, I'm going to assume we both voted for Taiwan but deny myself that certainty until I can get the results thread fully up-to-date.

Fun fact: Ten years and 168 films later, this matchup represents the first time I got to watch consecutive bracket films in high definition!

pixote
« Last Edit: June 16, 2018, 04:49:04 PM by pixote »
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smirnoff

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #2498 on: June 15, 2018, 12:29:42 AM »
Fun fact: Ten years and 168 films later, this matchup represents the first time I got to watch consecutive bracket films in high definition!

I wonder if that were even possible with these two films ten years ago. :)

PeacefulAnarchy

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #2499 on: June 15, 2018, 12:56:26 AM »
What's interesting is that reading the reviews I expected you to go the other way.
Interesting that this reaction applies to pixote's reviews as well.

 

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