{"id":1804,"date":"2009-02-12T01:02:04","date_gmt":"2009-02-12T05:02:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=1804"},"modified":"2009-02-12T01:02:04","modified_gmt":"2009-02-12T05:02:04","slug":"still-life-2006-jia-zhang-ke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/1804","title":{"rendered":"Still Life (2006, Jia Zhang-Ke)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I can&#8217;t remember according to <em>who<\/em> was this the greatest film of 2006 (or &#8217;07 or &#8217;08, depending when they saw it) but I was predictably underwhelmed.  Having seen <em>The World<\/em> and <em>Unknown Pleasures<\/em>, I kept my whelm-expectations low, so I was only mildly underwhelmed, but still&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>A nice, straightforward story&#8230; woman is searching for her husband who went missing two years ago to obtain a divorce.  We&#8217;re on the Yangtze (flood levels are lower than in <a href=\"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/1802\">the documentary<\/a> since this one was shot sooner) but this movie has less of a tourist feel, sticks with the characters instead of reveling in landscapes.  Don&#8217;t know which approach I preferred.<\/p>\n<p>Quiet movie, medium-paced with lots of breathing room.  Unexceptionally serious-artfilmesque for long stretches.  But then there&#8217;s the aliens.  One scene with a darting UFO in the sky, one awesome bit where a statue becomes a rocket and blasts off, and the final shot: the woman leaving town, looking back at a man walking a tightrope between two buildings unexplained.  I am all for more weirdness in movies, but the weirdness here seemed to be wedged in where it didn&#8217;t belong.<\/p>\n<p>According to IMDB, all the actors in this were in all the director&#8217;s other films (two of which I&#8217;ve seen, but I barely remember the films let alone the actors).<\/p>\n<p>I hope I figure out what everyone is on about, watch this again sometime with a new appreciation for its rich subtexts and symbolism and emotional impact, and come back to revise this post, embarrassed that I once called such a masterpiece underwhelming and unexceptional.  I surely enjoyed it more than <em>The World<\/em> (and 4-5 times more than <em>Unknown Pleasures<\/em>) so I&#8217;m getting closer anyway.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I can&#8217;t remember according to who was this the greatest film of 2006 (or &#8217;07 or &#8217;08, depending when they saw it) but I was predictably underwhelmed. Having seen The World and Unknown Pleasures, I kept my whelm-expectations low, so I was only mildly underwhelmed, but still&#8230; A nice, straightforward story&#8230; woman is searching for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[200,815,814],"class_list":["post-1804","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-china","tag-jia-zhang-ke","tag-three-gorges"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1804","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1804"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1804\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1857,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1804\/revisions\/1857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1804"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1804"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1804"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}