by ·Comments Off on Legend of the Mountain (1979, King Hu)

So titled because I Married a Witch was already taken. Scholar-dropout-turned-copyist Shih Chun takes a gig to copy some holy sutras, heads to a quiet place in the country where he can focus, and that plan sure does backfire. First he gets wasted at the annoying neighbor’s house while her daughter Melody plays trance-drums, then he wakes up and Melody claims they slept together, so they get married. Now he has a new wife, an annoying mother-in-law and a contradictory host, and they’re all being circled by the host’s deranged servant Old Chang who looks suspiciously like a vampire, plus a disappearing hot flautist called Cloud, and a Lama.

Movie is good for its entire 3+ hour runtime – King sure knows how to frame a shot and set up a scene. And it gets slowly weirder and more unsettling, until after two whole hours of gradual build, we’re rewarded with a dance-fight wuxia scene. This is post-Star Wars but instead of using light beams to portray the magic, he sticks with flashbangs, colored smoke, and surreal reverse-film effects. It’s belatedly explained that Melody and Cloud are rival magicians, and even more belatedly demonstrated that everybody here except Shih is a ghost.

All the ghosts get backstories via drum-induced flashback (there is a lot of aggressive spiritual hand-drumming in this). Cloud, the Lama, the host, and even Old Chang appear to be our guy’s savior and/or evil conspirators at different points. Melody is banished to hell but easily escapes for a final showdown, and when Shih (whose primary ability until now has been to run away) gets fed up of all these ghosts, he throws his prayer beads into the air and everyone burns up. All these actors are from the same year’s Raining in the Mountain except the great Sylvia Chang as Cloud, who went on to Shanghai Blues and Office.

The most suspenseful scene to me, hoping drunken Shih wouldn’t break this teapot:

I recently discovered The Chinese Cinema site, where Sean writes: “As a wuxia mystery film, it feels more in the spirit of Tsui Hark’s debut The Butterfly Murders (also from 1979),” which sounds promising, so I’m watching that next.

Shih is terrific as the scholar, dogged yet constantly befuddled, but ultimately competent (you do feel for him when he finally discovers how much he’s been manipulated and the film’s final shots wouldn’t work if we didn’t know this man so well as he stands alone against a raging river). It’s a very different character than his ultra-confident swordsman in Dragon Gate Inn or even his not-as-clever-as-he-thinks scholar in A Touch of Zen.

This is what happens when ghosts mess with prayer beads:

by ·Comments Off on The Private Eyes (1976, Michael Hui)

A pretty poor movie to split up and watch across two nights. The first half is pure episodic comedy, vaguely setting up the characters and detective agency (very good!) and the second is episodic plotty stuff, the guys working somewhat-together to solve cases and/or foil a big robbery they accidentally got in the middle of (pretty average!). So after tonight’s mid-70s grey/brown adventures, trying to hold on to the laughs from the night before.

Neckbrace Ricky costarred in Mr. Vampire, kung-fu Sam starred in Tsui Hark’s Swordsman, and detective Michael (also of Chinese Box) was known as Hong Kong’s lead comedy director until Stephen Chow showed up. Sean Gilman says The Contract is better, but it’s 1976 Week, so that one’ll have to wait a couple years.

by ·Comments Off on I Am Not Madame Bovary (2016, Feng Xiaogang)

Watched this for its circular frames and I had an enjoyable time. The title is a translation quirk, the English-language equivalent of a notorious cheater, but movie is based on the novel I Did Not Kill My Husband which would’ve been catchier.

Mike D’Angelo compares it to the Zhang Yimou movies, and that checks out. Bingbing Fan (best known as a tax criminal, also 17th-billed in an X-Men movie) fake-divorces her husband as a real-estate scheme, and when he goes off with another woman instead of remarrying her, she pesters the government for decades (until his death) trying to get the fake-divorce reversed. By the end all the government officials are new people because she got their predecessors fired, and nobody knows how to stop this woman from causing a scene every year.

Beijing:

The Mayor was in Touch of Sin, her “cousin” Wang in Hidden Blade, seducer/traitor/rapist Datou was Andy’s rival cop in Blind Detective, and the court guy who hired the seducer starred in Cliff Walkers.

by ·Comments Off on Grand Tour (2024, Miguel Gomes)

On the run from his fiancee Molly, our guy Edward goes from Burma to Singapore to a train derailment to a farming village to Bangkok to Saigon to Manila. He gets feverish and so does the movie. On to Osaka to a temple in the north mountains, deported to Shanghai, hop a boat up the Yangtze, to Chengdu. This is 90% b/w with unexplained color segments, set in 1917 but with modern vehicles plainly visible and sometimes anachronistic clothes. Edward hanging out while his guide stops to smoke opium, the movie suddenly switches to Molly.

Molly loves Burma, soon runs into Diogo Doria. In Saigon, Ngoc says her master Mr. Sanders wants to marry Molly, so the girls run away from him together. The movie does a good job of making me want to visit Vietnam. In China they visit the same giant Buddha we saw. Molly gets sick, pushes hard but dies along the way.

by ·Comments Off on A Chinese Ghost Story III (1991, Ching Siu-Tung)

Tony Leung is our buffoon young monk, taking over while Leslie was off filming Once a Thief. Jackie Cheung returns as the swordsman and Joey Wong as the ghost, but I can’t even tell if there’s character continuity (it does open with the title “100 years later”) or if they keep remaking part one with the same cast and different action scenes. Either way, all three movies are wonderful and mad.

Tony and his Master are hiding out at the dilapidated temple after greedy townspeople glimpsed their golden buddha, where Tony falls for Joey but has to keep his ghost gf a secret from his ghost-banishing master. Introduced giving each other sexy tattoos, Joey has a frenemy in Nina “Wife of Jet” Li, both of them in the power of the Tree Demon Priestess. Epic fights and aggressive praying ensue, but mostly… tongues. Evil ghosts have mile-long tongues, and the tongue-POV shots kill me every time. I guess Tony ascends from the earthly plane and becomes the new golden buddha to save them all.

by ·Comments Off on Dead Talents Society (2024, John Hsu)

Masterful mashup of different ghost movie premises, dead girl is forced to Monsters Inc before she Back to the Futures, joins a misfit team of has-beens and together they thrive.

by ·Comments Off on Come Drink With Me (1966, King Hu)

The second time I’ve watched Tsai/King movies back to back, this time by accident. Pale guy in white robe (Chen Hung-Lieh) kidnaps the governor’s son Master Chang until Golden Swallow (Jade Fox herself) shows up to set things right. But she gets poisoned, then rescued by Drunken Cat (House of 72 Tenants star Elliot Ngok Wah), whose archrival Abbot Liao Kung (One-Armed Swordsman villain Yang Chi-Ching) teams up with the pale guy for a showdown. The action in this is slower and less fluid than usual, but the people on the internet say it’s actually great, so what do I know.

Swallow vs. Pale Guy:

Abbot vs. Drunken Cat:

by ·Comments Off on Caught by the Tides (2024, Jia Zhang-Ke)

Mark Asch:

What constitutes “realism,” when reality itself has changed so vastly, so comprehensively? The elasticity of the term is the defining quality of Jia’s filmography, which, in telling the story of people living through immense social change, variously reaches for strange effects, formal wooliness, and reflexivity. His films are a canvas stretched across the frame of a world forever in flux.

Vadim Rizov:

Li has aged much more dramatically than Zhao but both their transformations over nearly a quarter-century are inevitably poignant. Does that generate anything beyond a reflexive effect? I think so; Caught by the Tides is a multiverse manifestation rather than nostalgia trigger — or, at least, this is a lot of neat footage, and it’s fun to see it find a home. Above all else, Zhao is a seemingly infinite performer whose affect hasn’t really been unpacked yet. Her stony unreadability is broken by unpredictable responses to others, manifestations of interest punctuating the deadpan surface of inscrutable women who, over the long haul, are reconfigured as martyrs or stoic survivors. Caught by the Tides reminds us that we’re all lucky as viewers that she and Jia found each other; it’s maybe the actress-director partnership of the ages.

by ·Comments Off on Circumstantial Pleasures (2020, Lewis Klahr)

Often I have no idea what he’s going for, or what any of the objects are supposed to represent, but it’s always pleasing to watch the patterns shift, the items shuffle about and disappear. Section 2 features assorted world leaders and other shitheads, more rapid color shifts and wackier sounds.

3. some of the envelopes and mattresses and money rolls recur across sections. In this one the music is more concrete. I got nothing on theme or visuals, just lost myself in the images.
4. a very dreamy section, I fell right asleep and had to pick up the next day

5. live footage out the window of a Chinese train in Sept 2016, looking exactly like the footage I shot out the window of a Chinese train in June 2019
6. The most varied and coolest section visually, or do I think that because it’s synced to a Scott Walker Bish Bosch song?