by ·Comments Off on Black Snow (1990, Xie Fei)

A prize winner in Berlin – Xie Fei’s followup, with the supremely uncatchy title Woman Sesame Oil Maker, would win the golden bear. This movie’s star Jiang Wen is better known – as a director and an actor from Zhang Yimou to Star Wars.

Young Jiang is out of jail and back in Beijing, his friends either imprisoned or dead, nobody happy to see him. He gets a tip and starts selling merchandise on the sidewalk, doing an impressive amount of business. Starts giving rides home to a girl who sings at his regular bar. All seems to be going ok until his buddy Chazi escapes from labor camp and comes visiting, then our boy’s life on the edges of the underworld starts catching up to him. The Kids Don’t Stand a Chance, part 30506.

by ·Comments Off on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000, Ang Lee)

I remembered the basics. Come Drink With Me star Cheng Pei-Pei is Jade Fox, Ziyi’s criminal master, who kills a whole bunch of people including, in the end, Chow Yun-Fat. Chang Chen, below, is Ziyi’s desert bandit lover Dark Cloud. Took long enough for this to be available in decent HD.

by ·Comments Off on A New Old Play (2021, Jiongjiong Qiu)

Rotterdance continues (concludes?) with a Locarno/Rotterdam movie.

Qiu is an apparently dead actor, demons Horsey and Ox come to collect him, we flashback to 1920 and make our way through Q’s life. He gets married in the 1940’s, their adopted daughter dies, their son is sad when his dad is declared a political criminal. Richard Brody: “The movie is filmed as theatrical tableaux, complete with blatantly contrived sets and supernatural fantasy sequences, which virtually shout at viewers not to take the depicted events as literal truth.” In the end it’s another movie about how life under communism was horrible – and it’s a misty, foggy movie, which the streaming video turned into shit soup.

by ·Comments Off on Wild Goose Lake (2019, Yi’nan Diao)

Beautiful right from the start, every scene a marvel. Gorgeous lighting, precise framing, the real deal This kind of discovery is the whole point of Rotterdance… oh, did I mention that it’s Rotterdance? I started it kinda late and am writing it up even later, but we spent a week or two watching movies that played recent editions of Sundance and Rotterdam fests. The Cathedral played both after premiering in Venice, and this one came to Rotterdam after Cannes.

“A gangster on the run sacrifices everything for his family and a woman he meets while on the lam,” sure, let’s leave it at that. He’ll (probably) star in Wong’s Blossoms movie/series/whatever. The girl helping him and the cop chasing him costarred in Diao’s Black Coal, Thin Ice.

by ·Comments Off on Millionaires’ Express (1986, Sammo Hung)

Sammo plays a thief and killer and master bullshitter. Terrific opening scene – he finds a field of dead soldiers and loots their bodies, but they were only playing dead for a military game, stand up and capture Sammo, take him back to base and humiliate him, then he blows them all up.

The point is supposed to be a train robbery, but nobody can stand still long enough to wait for the train; buildings are burned down and a bank is robbed before it even arrives. Too many characters and factions to keep track of. James Tien was in there somewhere, and Rosamund Kwan of the Once Upon a Time in China series, and Hwang Jang-Lee (the “dead” friend/villain of Game of Death II). Wong Fei-hung is in this, meets his rival Kien, both as little kids. People can’t stop jumping out of two-story buildings. Whenever the pace is less than frantic, he simply speeds up the film… this is cheating, but the result is absolutely thrilling, so I’ll allow it.

No revisionist western is complete without one of these:

The protestors and prostitutes team up against the patriarchy:

by ·Comments Off on The Boxer from Shantung (1972, Chang Cheh)

Ma Yongzhen is a tough dude working shitty jobs with his useless friend Cheng Kang-Yeh. Ma is introduced beating up a landlord, so he’s got our sympathy, though he seems to beat up pretty much everyone he comes across… this is fine, since it’s established that everyone in town’s a crook. Ma has annoyingly high standards, is poor and homeless and will accept nothing from anyone – though as principled as he seems, his dream is to ride in his own carriage with a fancy cigarette holder. He wanders into a brutal gang fight and takes on 20 guys armed with knives and hatchets, which gains him the attention of the local bosses, beginning his brief, violent career in organized crime. He’s finally ambushed in a teahouse by Boss Yang (Nan Chiang) and takes a hatchet to the torso, but doesn’t go down before killing everyone in the room. Good action scenes – I could watch about 300 more of these movies, and fortunately that’s how many they made.

Ma and his idol David Chiang (Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires):

Scar-faced Boss Fan (Yi Feng of Fist of Fury the same year) and his yes-man:

by ·Comments Off on In the Same Breath (2021, Nanfu Wang)

We don’t wanna sit around watching covid docs, but after her last movie, we trusted Nanfu Wang to make a good one. The initial hook is her Chinese/American family getting caught a world apart when lockdowns begin, but the family-reunion adventure-film doesn’t play out. Instead, she sends Chinese reporters into hospitals and on other missions, spends all day and night sifting through their footage and various social media posts, piercing the censorship veil to locate real stories of the virus’s initial spread, its early damage and the government’s control over the media, before flipping back to the U.S. to discuss the same kind of political spin doctoring and poor decisions here.

by ·Comments Off on Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue (2020, Jia Zhang-ke)

At first glance this is more of a straight doc than I Wish I Knew. Interviewing a handful of writers, with pillow daily-life scenes in the cities the writers are from. Soft piano or string music, when there’s any. Between chapters someone will read aloud from the previous writer’s work, followed by a repeated line from the same passage in subtitles over black screen.

by ·Comments Off on Green Snake (1993, Tsui Hark)

Extremely fun movie, opening with a powerful monk capturing an evil old man who’d been training for 100 years to ascend to human form, and I don’t know a whole lot about Chinese mythology but supermonk (Vincent Zhao, who took over the Once Upon a Time in China series after part 3) seems kinda like the bad guy. This is confirmed towards the end when he’s singlemindedly pursuing his enemies while carelessly destroying temples and drowning monks as collateral damage.

Green and Supermonk:

Supermonk has a tentative alliance with two snake sisters. White Snake (Joey Wong, lost in the huge cast of Eagle Shooting Heroes, also in the Chinese Ghost Story trilogy) is older and more powerful, while Green Snake (Maggie Cheung, at the tail end of her period of starring in ten films per year) is more bold and curious. They seduce some local guy (Wu Hsing-Guo), who will die along with White in the climactic supermonk-caused catastrophe.

Meantime we get colorful sets, giant snake tails, ludicrous side plots, tons of flying, great staging and action.

Wu Hsing-Guo, resurrected:

Previous stories and films based on this folktale have been named White Snake, so the titular focus on the younger sister indicate Tsui’s and Farewell My Concubine writer Lillian Lee’s intention to turn tradition on its head.