Round Five MatchupThe Hole (Tsai Ming-liang, 1998)
Won over The Last Dance (verdict by worm@work)Won over Stage Door (verdict by BlueVoid)Won over Ermo (verdict by Jared)Won over Kamikaze Taxi (verdict by mañana)Won over The Road Home (verdict by Beavermoose)I don't really know how to talk about how moist
The Hole is without opening up all sorts of Quoting out of Context possibilities, but that moistness is truly one of the movie's most defining characteristics. Tsai's film is a wet towel tasked with soaking up the puddle created by an unceasing leak. It's also an alienating film about alienation. If you watched
How I Met Your Mother, you're no doubt familiar with Barney's more successful
theatrical adaptation (which I humbly suspect is the most ingenious comparison ever made in a review of this film).
The Hole should be screened annually on April Fool's Day as part of a nineties Arthouse Ponce double feature with Todd Haynes'
Safe. Intermission would include a musical number, and everyone would sniff glue.
The Road Home (Zhang Yimou, 1999)
Won over 6ixtynin9 (verdict by smirnoff)Won over Butterfly Lovers (verdict by jdc)Won over Supermarket Woman (verdict by Verite)Won over Sopyonje (verdict by Jared)Lost to The Hole (verdict by Beavermoose)It's so fitting that
The Road Home ends with a freeze frame, because it's exactly that kind of film. You've seen saccharine, overly sentimental, tv movies before, right? The kind with scripts dependent on pedestrian voiceover narration and editing reliant on ill-advised slow motion and ubiquitous dissolves? Yeah, so you know exactly what I mean. The Arthouse Ponce Theatre could pair it with
The Straight Story as part of a tribute to the effortful burials in the innocuous nineties. It's the rare film that would have been improved by commercial breaks, especially if they were highly jingled ads for frumpy winter coats at the Chinese version of Old Navy ("as worn by Zhang Ziyi in the film!"). Once again,
How I Met Your Mother colors my viewing, this time with
the Dobler-Dahmer Theory. The love-at-first-sight romance at the heart of
The Road Home is, for me, the tale of a relentless, crazed stalker who won't rest until her beloved's soul is trapped in his grave.
Verdict: I haven't been able to watch many films lately, so perhaps I'm expecting even more from the few I'm able to watch than usual, but this was obviously a hugely disappointing matchup for me. Having just had a very good experience with Tsai's
Vive L'Amour, I couldn't wait to watch another of his films ... a feeling which lasted maybe ten minutes into
The Hole. I was, to be fair, in a highly negative mood that day and disappointed with the DVD presentation (having been able to enjoy
Vive L'Amour in HD), but give my a Blu-Ray release and a generous dose of Paxil and I'm not sure my take would be any different. I'm jealous of the experience everyone else had with the film in this bracket (and retroactively mad at worm@work for using the same screenshot), but I just can't relate. It all sounds much better on paper than it did while watching — an experience more akin to having moist salt rubbed in my psychic wounds.
The Road Home was a rewatch for me, and my disappointment in
The Hole was great enough that a second viewing seemed superfluous. I confidently remembered the film as a toothless but well photographed movie with a shining debut performance from Zhang Ziyi. But rewatch it I did and ... yikes. It is in fact pretty well photographed — but the editing is so atrocious as to undercut much of the photographic beauty (which itself is far from perfect). The photography is better in isolation, like in the screenshots in smirnoff's verdict. There is one shot of Zhang disappearing into a blizzard that would maybe make the shortlist of best shots in the bracket — but it suffers from its middling context. And Zhang Ziyi's role doesn't really give her much to do besides run awkwardly through nice scenery with a desperate smile on her face, none of which rises to the level of impressive. The same character seen in old age is much more interesting, and I rather wish the story had played out completely in the present, without the long, central flashback. I had the "toothless" part right, but the other billion films I've watched for this bracket make that label seem rather generous here. There should have been twice as many shot of characters working looms, cooking dumplings, and repairing broken dishes.
I'm not excited to see either of these films advance, but the more interesting failure (
The Hole) is moving on to the sweet sixteen.
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