by ·Comments Off on The Sadness (2021, Rob Jabbaz)

Starts as a mild relationship drama (she has a job, he is useless), then he goes outside and witnesses an extremely sudden citywide outbreak of The Crazies. The infected get red around their big black eyes, sport a big grin, and torture normals for fun, retaining their person skills (can talk and use weapons). After no living humans are in sight, the crazies have violent blood orgies. So our guy runs back home to come up with a plan, after the gardener neighbor cuts off a couple of his fingers, meanwhile the girl has taken the midnight meat train to work, uh oh. Rest of the movie is them trying to find each other, meeting up at a hospital, each trailing their own zombie archnemesis. I feel like it’s trying to be somewhat comical in an over-the-top gory kind of way, like Terrifier, but mostly ends up depressing (“charmless, sadistic“).

by ·Comments Off on Vive L’Amour (1994, Tsai Ming-Liang)

Realtor Yang Kuei-mei (The Hole‘s downstairs resident) brings home her Eat Drink Man Woman costar Chen Chao-jung from the mall, and while she’s occupied, passerby Lee steals her house key. Now all three of them live part-time in the same apartment, semi-aware of each other. Nobody really feels great about any of this, or about their jobs or anything else.

Does all their work seem scammy, or do movies make all businesses look scammy? This won the Golden Horse (over Eat Drink and Chungking Express) and the top prize at Venice (tied with Before the Rain, over Heavenly Creatures and Ashes of Time), beating two different Wong Kar-Wai movies within three months.

by ·Comments Off on Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003, Tsai Ming-liang)

I watched Dragon Inn (1967) at home Friday night. On Saturday I was the only person who bought a ticket to Goodbye, Dragon Inn which is entirely set in a nearly-empty movie theater that is playing Dragon Inn… then I was the only person at West Side Story (2021), which is of course a remake of the 1961 movie. So, both of the newer movies are resurrecting the 60’s in their own way, both feature people watching their younger selves (actors from Dragon Inn are in the Goodbye audience, and 2021 Rita Moreno has a big scene with Anita, Rita Moreno’s 1961 role)… and both feature coin-operated fortune-telling machines.

Goodbye was my first Tsai film, watched originally on a blurry DVD, which inspired my first pre-blog web writeup. This week I’ve seen it twice – or, one a a half times, the second being a Metrograph stream in the background while I read Nick Pinkerton’s book on the film (and on so many related topics). Reading while the movie plays feels like a good idea, not only with the other Fireflies/Decadent books, but with books in general, which I should maybe always be reading with a Tsai film playing behind them. This movie seemed so slow and empty twenty years ago, and now it seems very full – and I wrote “so many cuts” in my notes, so my definition of “slow” is obviously very different now.

Apichatpong is a big fan, and I thought of his actress Jen when the crippled ticket taker was making her way around the theater. The first words aren’t spoken until halfway through, and they’re about ghosts. Later, our Japanese cruiser encounters a seed-chewing woman who may be a ghost, and he runs straight out of the movie. On the same day I watched this movie where a guy is confronted by a loud eater, a Florida cop was acquitted for killing a guy who threw popcorn during a movie argument.

“No one comes to the movies anymore.” Surprised at how small Lee Kang-sheng’s projectionist role is here, and how much of the movie takes place not in the screening room but the surrounding hallways. Despite being set in the back alleys of a haunted crumbling building, it’s at least as gorgeous as the King Hu film, probably more so.

by ·Comments Off on Dragon Inn (1966, King Hu)

Watched this when I realized I’d get to see the Goodbye, Dragon Inn restoration in theaters. More focused on simple conflict and action than the other two King Hu films I’ve seen, the plot keeps accumulating unstoppably brilliant fighters who kill scads of flunkies until all the brilliant fighters finally converge against each other – or more specifically, five legendary heroes team up against the sinister eunuch army seeking to kill a slain general’s entire family.

The two who will later meet in Goodbye’s dying theater are lead hero/drifter Shih Chun (also star of A Touch of Zen) and the white-haired eunuch boss’s chief soldier Miao Tien (already a Tsai regular by the time of Goodbye). Shih joins the orange and blue sibling team of Hsieh Han and Shangkuan Ling-fung (the perpetually pissed-off woman in front on the new Criterion box art), and eventually another supernaturally fast duo joins up. It takes all of them to dispatch the lead soldiers and then the eunuch boss himself (Bai Ying). The subtitles say he suffers from “asthma” but it appears to be psychedelic migraines. Reportedly a game-changing film, King Hu breaking from the Shaw Brothers studio to independently reinvent wuxia cinema, it still holds up as a beautiful and kickass picture.

by ·Comments Off on Days (2020, Tsai Ming-liang)

Lee is taking it easy, getting treatments for a bad back, which includes having Anong give him a happy-ending massage in a hotel room. Anong seems touched by the gift of a music box, the two grab a meal together. Even less happens in 2+ hours than in Tsai’s Walker shorts.

I’d been counting shots but lost track when I had to pause for a meal – surely fewer than 100 total. Shot #9 was food prep, not a great camera setup but I learned a new method of shredding green papayas. Shot #20 the camera moves through an alley!

Cinema Scope’s pick for movie of the year. Blake Williams’s writeup ties it to Tsai’s earliest films with Lee, which I still haven’t watched, so I’m lacking some context, but I still don’t think I’m in the headspace where a movie this meditative is gonna be a high favorite.

by ·Comments Off on Raining in the Mountain (1979, King Hu)

Competing groups arrive for a faithful abbot’s retirement, each scheming with one of the abbot’s protege monks to get their hands on the monastery’s priceless scroll. Such smooth editing, hard to find scene breaks as the whole thing flows together, and modern looking for 1979. Almost the entire cast was in King Hu’s Legend of the Mountain the same year.

Sailor Wen (Yueh Sun: City on Fire) brings thief White Fox (Touch of Zen star Feng Hsu) and tassel-face Gold Lock (Ming-Tsai Wu, a student in Fist of Fury). His rival The General (Feng Tien of Green Snake) brings cop Kuang Yu Wang (in a John Woo, a Wei Lo/Jackie Chan, and a “Bruce Li” the same year), who is archenemy to the newest monk, reformed criminal Chiu Ming (Lin Tung, the movie’s assistant director). Old master Wu Wai (Chia-Hsiang Wu, in movies since the 1940’s) may be up to something, or maybe just a distraction. Chiu Ming is made the new abbot and his first act is to destroy the scroll, and the villains go home unhappy.

Fox / Lock / Wen:

The cop gets his:

by ·Comments Off on Millennium Mambo (2001, Hou Hsiao-hsien)

The opposite of what I just said about Undine (“thought the overall structure of the movie only kinda worked, but moment-to-moment I was quite thrilled to be watching it”) – in this case I didn’t appreciate any particular scene at the time, but ended up thinking it was great.

Set ten years in the future, telling a story about the past (then-present) year 2001, when raves were still in fashion. The Assassin star Shu Qi is Vicky, stuck with her abusive and controlling man Hao-hao (Duan Chun-hao of Long Day’s Journey Into Night). She’s with rich Jack (Hou lifer Jack Kao) for a while, but movie is a cycle – I like the pulsing music under all the action that sometimes rises and takes over. Beautifully mobile camera, I dig how it moves from outside to inside Jack’s place via security cam. I guess I’ve seen half of Hou’s major films now, but I still don’t have a strong sense of what he’s on about.

by ·Comments Off on A Touch of Zen (1968, King Hu)

The first I’ve seen by the legendary King Hu – his followup to Dragon Inn. I kinda love him, great compositions and movement, and killer distortion when he pans with the super-wide lens, which I know is a defect but in the fisheye 2019 post-Favourite world it comes across as a feature. Apparently the first Chinese film to be awarded at Cannes (in main competition with Pastoral, Kasper Hauser and Chronicle of the Years of Fire).

We follow Gu (Chun Shih of Dragon Inn), who is a well-meaning but unambitious scholar and painter, with a tendency towards being clumsy and ineffectual. He’s the patsy witness to all the nearby political intrigue, falling for the hot girl next door, Yang (Feng Hsu of Legend of the Mountain, later a producer on Chen Kaige films), who is in hiding after her dad was tortured to death, then in the second half he inexplicably becomes a master of strategy and helps Yang and her loyal generals ward off the corrupt government attackers. Some invincible monks get involved, there are a bunch of good faceoffs, Gu wears too much makeup.

by ·Comments Off on Yi Yi (2000, Edward Yang)

“We live three times as long since man invented movies.”

First movie watched in 2017. Interweaving life stories of family members during the year grandma spent in a coma, with mirrors of behaviors and situations across generations.

NJ and daughter Ting-Ting with the happy couple:

NJ is Nien-Jen Wu (cowrote Hou Hsiao-Hsien films including City of Sadness and The Puppetmaster). He’s a reasonable, middle-aged, frowny-faced guy disillusioned with his job. He bumps into an ex, Sherry, at the wedding, then arranges to meet her in Japan while courting software developer Ota (Issei Ogata, the emperor in The Sun) for work. Having casual conversations with Ota about music and spending his days with Sherry (Su-Yun Ko also played a lead male character’s Tokyo ex in Taipei Story) gives him nostalgia flashbacks of first love, while his daughter Ting-Ting is home dealing with similar issues firsthand.

Ting-Ting starts the movie feeling guilty that she might be responsible for grandma’s stroke, and soon adds more typical teenage problems into the mix, as she picks up her new neighbor Lili’s barely-ex-boyfriend Fatty, but the two of them are nervously unsure how to be in a romantic relationship (and incidentally, he later murders the neighbor’s mom’s boyfriend).

The neighbor with Fatty, who is not fat:

Min-Min is the mom of the family (Elaine Jin, also a mom in A Brighter Summer Day), has a breakdown while trying to talk to her comatose mom then disappears to a meditation retreat for the rest of the movie. And young son Yang-Yang is a slightly offbeat kid (spotted in his room: Astro Boy, Mickey Mouse, Batman, Pikachu… and the Hindenburg) who takes photos of the backs of people’s heads (a naïve, questioning photographer/observer who shows people things they can’t see for themselves, named after the film’s director, hmm).

Yang-Yang couldn’t deal with the wedding reception food:

Newlywed astrology nut A-Di is Min-Min’s brother, can’t keep his financial or romantic act together, with his longtime ex-girlfriend Yun-Yun showing up at the wedding and baby shower and making scenes. His wife Xiao Yan threatens to leave then comes back thinking A-Di has attempted suicide – he says he just fell asleep in the tub with the gas on. And I think A-Di’s money is stolen by business partner Piggy (yes, there’s a Piggy and a Fatty).

Yang won best director at Cannes, and died of cancer seven years later without producing a follow-up, which was rumored to be an animated Jackie Chan feature.

Kent Jones:

The New Taiwan Cinema was a predominantly urban phenomenon, the better to dramatize the rapacious speed of cultural upheaval. And Yang, Hou, and the slightly younger, Malaysian-born Tsai have employed, each in his own unique way, the sights, textures, rhythms, and social configurations of city living to devastating effect … Yang has set his city symphonies in a variety of emotional keys — the doleful lament of Taipei Story, the gridlike coolness of The Terrorizer, the comic hysteria of A Confucian Confusion, the carefully modulated fury of Mahjong. In Yi Yi, he brings all of these moods together, never allowing any one of them to take precedence over another. Which is to say that this is a grand choral work, with a panoptic majesty.