贾樟柯导演的《天注定》| a touch of sin, directed by jia zhangke

http://i.imgur.com/fKvHViI.jpg

surrealist action movie? if so, enticed

i would say 'no' to both those descriptors

post a more representative jpg then!

the other good jpgs were too spoiler-y

i would say that this film is actually a little bit too straightforward

didn't have enough creativity, innovation or artistry? shame

in its violence? (haven't seen) xp

well i wouldn't want to spoil it for you, morbz!

hes not the sort of director i would expect you to like

re the maximalism discussion the other day

i'm not always maximalist! especially with film. cf bresson's diary of a country priest

Looking forward to it. Still Life one of my favorite movies of the last half decade.

diary of a country priest is a lot more agonized and compressed than jia tends to be

yeah this was really strong. can we just jump into things that vaguely qualify as spoilers? like i will try not to spoil in case people are still clicking into this thread with reckless curiosity, but. when i am thinking about this since seeing it it's about the structure. i remember a half hour in thinking about how the subsequent depiction of the guy pictured above had retroactively made sense of how clumsily he had been tossing the tomato in the opening shot. that his kinda garrulousness & imprecision righted this strangely played scene. & the rest of the film is weighted with similar care and balance, i think - i'm pretty sure that some of what makes the last section (/chapter/w/e) so affecting is how we're primed for it, & what relief it seems to promise; we've had to steel for more violence, never avoided, just awkwardly delayed and then delivered, these flinching shots of it, & then we're in something that is suddenly operating in this incredibly gentle register (maybe not dissimilar to the middle section of hou's three times?, though maybe that's a lazy comparison). i wondered if the last section could, as a standalone thing, work as a pretty sobering dispatch, but i think some of its effect is tied up in the structure of the film.

i can see the arguments for it being too straightforward, sure. narratively it's pretty linear, i think it's that you're fairly claustrophobically entrapped in whichever thread it is pursuing while it happens.

i guess we can see which direction this thread goes in but the other things i thought about this were pretty simplistic reactions to the sorta modest dystopia it constructs of working in china. i don't know if it's still cause i erroneously think of jia as being intrinsically somewhat ~underground~ - which i'm aware he with various levels of cultural irony isn't - but each shot of this that testified to any significant investment in production really wowed me; plane landings, factory production lines, workers outside the factory. it seemed astonishingly bold, prominent.

give the word and I'll watch a Jia movie & report back. which one?

the world?

or maybe the one named after the joy division album

the world is the only other jia i've seen and it was good though probably WHOOSH'd over my 20 yr old self... been meaning to check out still life / unknown pleasures since forever

the world is the reason i found myself at the chinese ethnic minority park in beijing one hot summer day. : |

i feel like you would really like platform imago but it sorta sucks to not be able to see it at a cinema, it's a little long & is a pretty film but in a kinda spatial way probably ill-served by small screens

has anybody seen pickpocket? i've always meant to watch it

Platform (2000) is epic but may be hard to get hold of.

Alfred, Still Life was 2006 ('08 in US).

morbs, this is also playing at lincoln plaza cinemas in case that's more convenient than IFC

Platform (2000) is epic but may be hard to get hold of.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piIASNlqjq0

as schlump said and David Lynch might, don't watch that fucking movie on YouTube.

(meh, unless it's impossible any other way i guess)

I've got a computer with a large screen

i've got a fast car

*farts*

You have 5 further minutes to complain while I grab a bite to eat and then it's movietime

prepared to relax my standards in light of the positive attitude of anybody who is just like let me fix a snack before i sit down & watch a two & a half hour chinese period piece on youtube, pretty sure i delayed my more ideal & comfortable viewings for a long time

id suggest getting a k4r4g4rg4 invite and downloading the bluray rips of his recent films but enjoy the vhs quality 5th gen pyrotechnics if u must

its more real & truer to the spirit of life in an agrarian commune in podunks china 30 years ago, anyway

i've only seen unknown pleasures and i remember loving it, lots of motorcycles on new highways in exurban hell iirc? at that time i was just getting into movies with long-duration shots and a lot of spatial exploration and respecting jonathan rosenbaum for whatever awful reason. i'm still into the kind of thing that gently lulls you to sleep basically, a note of urban discontent is ok as long as the soundtrack isn't too loud, i don't see a listing here for this but i wouldn't be surprised if it came for like four days in january or something, keeping my fingers crossed.

xp haha

respecting jonathan rosenbaum for whatever awful reason

nah he's the best one

my stream has had a loading issue 8 minutes in but great so far. hopefully this is the last update for the next 2 and a bit hours

no imago that is a long take

get blunted 2 fuq and enjoy the show imago lad http://i.imgur.com/ED9eRuO.gif

Still Life is amazing

imago, some of jia's films are p cheap to buy in eg fopp, and are available to rent legit from lovefilm

yeah pretty extraordinary

unformed immediate thoughts: moved from a fairly static first half to a crazy, delocated second. it became all about departures, arrivals, jarring cuts between hairstyles & band-members. the Culture Team literally and figuratively sailing away down the river, changing its name, heading even into the desert before turning around and going back. the fetishisation of movement, of trains, as promised early on, becomes a baffling and humbling world of missed connections

some wonderful shots. especially liked one early on as our bespectacled protagonist and his maybe-girlfriend have a conversation obscured by the corner of a building, each disappearing behind it & subsequently emerging in alternation. also loved the front-of-cab shots (arrivals, departures) and the increasingly allegorical style

the most haunting character obviously sanming - his central cameo crucial to the entire movie & practically made me cry as he walked off - although it is also noticeable how the two female leads respond to the pressures of both modernity & established creed - they're extremely sensitive to the double-pull, although it is zhong who follows the path (of what rapidly turns out to be exploitation, both by her buss and her commitment-shy boyfriend) furthest before reaching combustion point and disappearing

sanming of course the victim of china old and new, the servant to all masters

mmmm sounds like some good weed!!

o hush. also what ya got vs rosenbaum

nice
i hope u now go on to become ilx' maven of contemporary chinese cinema
lord knows apart from taiwan i am not that well versed

A MAVEN

LJ PLEASE BECOME A MAVEN

rosenbaum is fine, i just stopped caring

he retired

oh yeah

supreme film critic but i seldom read him now because.......it's on a blog

his reader archive (along with camper and to some degree kehr) was my most important formative influence wrt film as a teenager

he's the only film critic I'd say I trust. had my david thompson phase but now I regard him as more a very talkative fellow fan

my mavenhood is limited to a very few topics, at least within an ILX context. probably only cricket

and pizza

you have a good work ethic
you could be a chinese contemporary cinema maven in maybe a fortnight of reasonably dedicated study

i will be posting a trite opinion about the importance of 'springtime in a small town' on the 21st of october and i fully expect it to be given short shrift

haha it's a thought

really though I have to be maven of my writing. I will however pledge to only watch contemporary Chinese movies for the next 6 months (at home - I want to see Gravity)

good - we could use some contrary challopsing in the gravity thread

oh I plan to like it

oh wait that's clearly a sign that there's alREADY been some *crazy challopsing* well this is ILX ffs of course, I'd be sad if there wasn't

no... i was playing it straight. the only challopsing has been by the croup and he hasn't even seen it yet

sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssspoilerssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss

very interesting, schlump!

yeah, the guy in the intro - dahai. i didn't think to reexamine the opening after knowing the denouement of his segment, but: a heavy static of the potential overlays that first scene. a truck of tomato cartons, overturned - he has plucked but one - sitting on his motorcycle, unsure of what to do. meanwhile the other guy arrives, takes measure, wends his way through, is on his way again. i don't want to draw out the obvious symbolism here but, classmates with the coal mine boss, two lives weighted differently, one ascendant, the other...flat. the story portrayed in the first segment rang the most true to me, even if its irruption into violence felt the most fantastical, wish-fulfillment out of the stories. from here i'm just gonna bullet point some stuff that i took note of while watching;

• dahai eating his dinner with cloves of raw garlic. yes, this is how a real Northerner does it.
• dahai jabs himself with a medical device - i think it's probably one that measures his blood sugar. he's probably diabetic. the next scene: he enters the factory, all his chums are eating noodles, he has a bite from a friend.
• the shots of the horse getting whipped. how dahai's avenging angel fantasy moves him to vengeance here. how this is the exact opposite of what nietzsche did.
• all the, uh, paratext? not sure what the lit crit term is here - but the other media that we see throughout the movie. for example, on the busride, the robber - the movie that's playing on the TV is hard boiled, natch, more specifically, the teahouse shootout. in the sauna girl's segment, the snake - the movie on the tv in the breakroom shows a woman with a forked tongue.
• the snake symbolism for the sauna girl's segment. i want to say that there's maybe an association between adulturesses and snakes in chinese culture, but it could just as easily be reference to the legend of the white snake, a popular chinese opera of old.
• the chinese name of the film, 天注定, translates as 'destiny,' and literally translates as 'heaven decides' - the only part of the film, as far as i can tell, where it is said, is by the hawker in the sauna girl segment - the part where he is talking about holy snakes, marriage is destined. or marriage is decided by heaven. tbh, i heard the phrase preceding 天注定 as 阴阳, or yin-yang. but i don't think that's a term for marriage.
• the english name, a touch of sin - i think the closest echo of this in the film is the final scene, where she goes to watch the beijing opera - the actor says "do you know your guilt?" and you could probably tanslate 'guilt' as 'sin.' apparently, according to wikipedia, the english name is a play on the wuxia film 'a touch of zen.'
• i'm not sure how prevalent the wuxia elements are in here, but - when the sauna girl kills the john, the knife movements - those are straight out of a wuxia film.
• similarly, the interplay between the stories and the play-within-a-plays of the beijing opera stage acts that the characteres encounter - dahai encounters one, and iirc it's thematically related to what happens in his segment. at the end - a person accused, wrongly she thinks, of being a murderer... the sense that none of the characters in this had agency in their actions, but were pushed towards it by outside pressures. hamlet....
• the dude who ends up at a brothel - i laughed when the guy tips him in hong kong dollars. lol, 100 hkd is not worth 100 cny. but - the promise of hong kong. how he learns cantonese, how his paramour knows cantonese, and is from his hometown. what a paradise hong kong must seem viewed from his digs in the gutter.
• the shots of the oxen and cow and animals in this movie. the three ox in the truck, shackled, staring. the cattle that the sauna girl walks by, oblivious to her crime.
• the animated background of leaves is taken from the wallpaper of the sauna/brothel.

apparently this movie has been cleared for release in the mainland. i'm surprised, but given the current culture of anti-corruption, maybe the party thinks it's good for people to ruminate on these matters.

Sort've talked about Jia Zhangke yesterday with Han Jie, though more about Hello, Mr. Tree. Still need to see this after missing it at the film festival, bleh.

Just wanted to say, that I'm very much looking forward to seeing this film whenever that will be (probably next spring), that I'll be watching Platform on youtube as well and thanks for the link, and that A Touch of Zen is awesome, especially the final part. That is all.

apparently this movie has been cleared for release in the mainland. i'm surprised, but given the current culture of anti-corruption, maybe the party thinks it's good for people to ruminate on these matters.

― 乒乓, Wednesday, October 9, 2013 8:34 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

dargis' review reminded me of the scene in the hostess club where all the girls are wearing sexy halloween red army costumes - again, surprised that this is being released domestically!

this is prob my movie of the year

http://25.media.tumblr.com/6fc7d1815d988297321249b7187fc8c8/tumblr_muubfyn7zf1ryzchqo1_r1_500.png

apparently jia loves putting john woo on small screens in his movies!

at first I wasn't sure if the violent conclusions to each story really worked, but thinking back, having this pattern in the back of my head for most of the movie really gave the it this powerful sense of dread and I found the fatalism of it all really moving at times

http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/18/q-a-jia-zhangke-on-his-new-film-a-touch-of-sin/?_r=0

Actually I had been preparing to make a martial arts film since 2007, a real martial arts film. It doesn’t have an English title yet. In Chinese it’s called “In the Qing Dynasty” (在清朝). It deals with the period from 1895 to 1905. The reason I wanted to film this period is because this is when China’s transformation began. And that transformation has continued up to now. It hasn’t stopped.

interesting - WKW covered a time period right after this in the grandmaster. the grandmaster can be seen as a critique of china's creation myth, i think, and it's interesting to see jia explicitly say the same about his movie.

i've been thinking about the scene with dahai at the post office - it's really quite perfect. dahai is exposed as a naïf, who has bought into the party propaganda that justice will be dispensed swiftly and certainly from 中南海 (the equivalent of the capitol building in DC, i think.) so he just tells the postal clerk, send it there! and while it's not surprising that she rebuffs him, i kind of feel that if dahai had been, say, the factory owner, the postal clerk would have known how to send the letter, would have found a way.

will work 4 karag4rg invite

i guess what i want to say is that, with chinese nationalism being what it is, it wouldn't exactly be ludicrous to expect that every postal clerk in the country would know how to send a letter to 中南海. it's a little bit like how every post office in america will accept letters to santa claus, with a wink.

i've been thinking about the scene with dahai at the post office - it's really quite perfect. dahai is exposed as a naïf, who has bought into the party propaganda that justice will be dispensed swiftly and certainly from 中南海 (the equivalent of the capitol building in DC, i think.) so he just tells the postal clerk, send it there! and while it's not surprising that she rebuffs him, i kind of feel that if dahai had been, say, the factory owner, the postal clerk would have known how to send the letter, would have found a way.

― 乒乓, Saturday, October 19, 2013 10:28 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

interesting

http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/20/q-a-jia-zhangke-on-his-new-film-a-touch-of-sin-part-2/?_r=0

Q.
You’ll be at the New York Film Festival at the end of September. Are you looking forward to it?

A.
It has a big Chinatown, and I’m looking forward to going there. The first thing is always to find a Chinatown. Then you can have a great Chinese meal. [laughs]

HEll Yeah

i did a little bit more digging and so yeah, snakes in chinese are a pretty standard trope for seductresses. or at least can be. i'm not familiar enough with wuxia films to know how jia is playing off that symbolism. see also the shot where the camera pans to the cloth w/ the tiger print, and you hear the tiger roar.

Really unexpected move by Jia (though I had been tipped even just skimming reviews) ... still 'documentary' elements aren't *entirely* absent I thought, just in comparison to what he'd been doing.

I knew this was episodic going in, but not sure if they were gonna overlap; so I was glad when we reached the end of Dahai's spree. For a bit.

For several months it has been pegged as being set to receive a (domestic) theatrical release in November, but still a more specific date has still not been set.

Now reports are emerging that the Chinese authorities have banned local media from reporting on the film or reviewing the picture, which claimed the best screenplay award at Cannes, where it played in competition.

http://variety.com/2013/film/news/silence-surrounds-jia-zhangkes-sin-1200853839/

i can see blue valentine 10+ times in manhattan today, and touch of sin once, at 1.40 in the afternoon.

yes and it's the last day, which is why i follow what's exiting theaters with great paranoia.

http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/06/taiwan-may-miss-out-on-jia-zhangkes-a-touch-of-sin/?_r=0

Everything seems fishy

what's fishy about the taiwan situation? i think it's, 1) a case of it just not being that big of a movie compared to what else is on the quota list and the quota longlist. there must be some goofy romantic comedies on the list but also drug war,《毒战》 and the grandmaster/《一代宗师》). 2) maybe a little bit about responding to cultural sector grumbling about mainland cultural influence. the last two years that mainland films won golden horse awards, let the bullets fly/《让子弹飞》 in 2011 and beijing blues/《神探亨特张》 in 2012, there was lots of handwringing, if that's the right word, about mainland films winning taiwanese awards and the brutish machinery of the mainland film industry overrunning taiwan.

even if it doesn't screen, i don't think it's a huge deal. on the other hand, it's never ever ever getting a legit mainland release. i feel like xi jinping or someone else near the top had a moment with this film something like deng xiaoping seeing unrequited love/《苦练》 for the first time.

Wasn't talking about the quota, I was referring to the fact that Jia writes that he can't go for "personal, insurmountable reasons" right around the same time that it's looking like the permission to release A Touch of Sin in the mainland is being revoked

Come on man, that stinks

Your points 1) and 2) are diametrically opposed, if Taiwan really was concerned about mainland brute clout cultural hegemony surely they'd shortlist smaller, more independent productions like A Touch of Sin over lamestream trash like American Dreams in China and Back to 1942

But the quota isn't set with regards to concerns about commercial appeal, the whole process is done through a lottery, if it was about commercial appeal films like Lost in Thailand and So Young would have already received widespread Taiwan releases

Drug War and the Grandmaster have already been released in Taiwan this year, bro

right, the fact that he suddenly can't go is strange. is your feeling that jia is a smart operator that plays the game just as much as is necessary to keep making pictures (pulling his documentary from melbourne, for example) or that he's got no choice?

and i see what you're saying about taiwan. i guess i'd like to slim my argument down to just saying that a touch of sin might be on the radar of the nytimes but isn't a huge deal to taiwanese cinemagoers compared to other bigger films coming from the mainland.

http://i.imgur.com/LPcuSwz.jpg

-- seeing wang baoqiang who i can't help but associate with his xu sanduo forrest gump soldier role/going to thailand being in love with fan bingbing and making her scallion cakes role/shilling for instant noodles and cold medication every commercial break on cctv wasting those motherfuckers on the road was a good shock.

i think the first chapter with dahai battling the maserati coal boss in shanxi (spending the last two months in shanxi made that chapter hit even harder) was clearly directly riffing on lin chong in 《heroes of the marsh》/《all men are brothers》/《the water margin》/, 《水浒传》-- the part of the opera that dahai catches is the part where lin chong is FORCED to kill gao qiu's two thugs... which is what 《水浒传》 is all about: righteous men forced to resort to violence against those in charge because the rules of brotherhood and 江湖 ----The concept of Jianghu can be traced to the 14th century novel Water Margin, in which a band of noble outlaws, who mounted regular sorties in an attempt to right the wrongs of corrupt officials, retreated to their hideout. These bandits were called the Chivalrous men of the Green Forests or 绿林好汉, the "green forest" (绿林, lǜlín) was the antecedent to Jianghu.---- also the lin chong story and other water margin stories aren't just about fighting injustice but about being humiliated (gao qiu's son is trying to fuck lin chong's wife -- dahai is beaten in front of a crowd and given that nickname etc) and the lin chong story hinges on a weapon too.... and it sort of directs the rest of the film toward that novel in particular where good men are forced into violence

whether justified attacks on corrupt leaders that have violated a sort of cosmic REMEMBER THE WATER MARGIN BOYS CAME OUT OF STARS natural righteousness that's destroying the natural world and humans together
and just chaotic fucked up violence which is also well represented in wuxia literature and the water margin in particular
and even the righteous violence can't be controlled and you have a lot of righteous characters inflicting a lot of collateral damage in their quest for justice.

i took a lot of pleasure in watching wang baoqiang shoot people down

I'm actually shocked to find out that Wang Baoqiang is an accomplished actor who's been involved in many big name projects rather than just a farmer plucked from a village

He looks so weedy

Never read the Water Margin, am really intrigued by yer post now

I've been reading about lots of land disputes in China that follow the same exact pattern of the shanxi story

Rural land, as we know, is collectively owned by the farmers of the village & use-rights can only be created if the villagers vote on it

The village convinces the farmers that allowing the land to be developed will be beneficial to all, profits will be distributed to all the villagers, jobs will be created and given to the villagers

Magically, all the profit that comes in somehow is retained by the village leaders & the farmers maybe get a carton of cigarettes + black lung

omg only just found out that Suikoden is the Japanese translation of "Water Margin", old Playstation RPG makes sense now

wang baoqiang is the star of this i think. best performance in the film: puffing lit the cigarettes in the kitchen and paying obeisance to ghosts... raising his pistol to the sky while the village sets off fireworks... the interactions with his son and wife... the ice cold robbery scene....

having seen this now, it's crazy that it was ever even rumored to have a mainland release. a lot of the chinese lang reviews from mainland viewers seem to see it as a direct attack on the party/govt even if they sometimes use slightly euphemistic terms to refer to that direct criticism.... obv that obsession with china (r.i.p. ct hsia) thing--focusing on any work of art produced by a chinese artist as being totally 100% about china and unrelatable to the greater experience of mankind whatever--is not the most interesting way to look at it.

they note in particular the use of the city wall, the yellow plains, eternal symbols of 5000000 years of history blah blah blah and how chinese history seems to be trapped in a cycle of moral decay->violence.

plus how if you view it as a retelling of the water margin... and more than any of the other 4 classics the water margin figured big in communist party romantic views of itself (mao loved it and it must have made good reading while they were hiding out in the caves yanan imagining they were liangshan heroes revolting against a failing empire and its corrupt bureaucracy) and in, like, actual party policy (discussion of the book and its lessons about fighting capitulationists within the party among other lessons were important during the cultural revolution). ...i think the the water margin parallels are obvious and it has an important history of being used to sort of obliquely attack corrupt leadership and affirm the correctness of revolt.

http://25.media.tumblr.com/dd86b174efac3f893be3ca3cf76be4d4/tumblr_n0rfecSG6F1r6ivyno1_500.jpg

i enjoyed this, but had a hard time reconciling some of the 'genre' elements with jia's more usual 'realistic' mode

i loved that about it.

Yeah, the tension between naturalism (for lack of a better term for how Jia's style is coded) and street-opera theatricality was part of what made it so compelling for me, along with the film's masterful pacing.

yeah... although i never really thought of any of his films as being, like particularly "realistic" or naturalist in any sense

like platform is super stylized and formal iirc

i think it's harder to separate his last few from realism, just because of social context, mastery of super-modern-seeming digital video & the extent to which they foreground docu-fiction grey-areaness

i think my 'complaint' is maybe that jia doesn't subject 'genre' to the same interrogation and play as he does 'the real'? i dunno, you are all v. persuasive

the genre moments are so fleeting that their duration almost feels like like that interrogation in and of itself?

http://asiasociety.org/blog/asia/how-china-made-sure-thered-be-no-touch-sin-oscars

i want to see this. it was in sight n sounds best of 2013 list. i did really like unknown pleasures, but thought that the second half, or third act or thereabouts, lost some of the realism and interesting stuff about the interaction between the characters and ended up with a few too many typically arthouse shots, things like the bike not starting up the hill, then having to stop on the motorway, i do like long unbroken shots and all the rest of it, but it seemed to almost be too easy after the momentum of everything that came before that, like a lapse into a romance of fallibility/the everyday, compared with the realism/reportage of the rest of the film. did love the ending though.

I am going to watch this again tonight because it's characters have been haunting my thoughts all week.

Which characters haunt your thought the most?

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/03/14/jia-zhangke-explains-why-censors-are-scared-of-his-award-winning-film/?mod=WSJBlog

The kid who works in factories probably, saying that there isn't a weaker part of the anthology.

Which Haunting Touch of Sin Character Are You?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deng_Yujiao_incident

I like the way Jia has inverted the hollywood trait of female depictions always being younger than the real characters.

in his casting? that's his lover/muse so I don't think the casting decision was deliberately provocative or anything, also why in hell would he be responding to Hollywood conventions in particular?

i assume you mean zhao tao.

the way he casts her in everything has given me pause, there's that scene in "i wish i knew" where she's wandering in the rain in shanghai and the camera lingers over the wet t-shirt clinging to her body and it's like ENOUGH, JIA ZHANGKE! ENOUGH! the scene felt so out of place (like other stuff in that film) that it exacerbated the sense of total indulgence.

he's an interesting filmmaker to say the least but i do think he peaked with platform, at least so far. something a bit glib about his recent fiction/doc hybrids that doesn't sit right w/ me. that includes still life/dong, useless, i wish i knew, 24 city.... i'd say the most interesting filmmaker working in china was Jiang Wen but his last film was a disappointment... stylistically bold and narratively intriguing but also kind of incoherent, and too many action films that played the same.

action SCENES

Let The Bullets Fly? Yeah that was trash

Lol didn't realise she was his lover, I preferred it when I thought it was a casting decision. I am watching 24 City this week on the strength of how much I loved AToS and suppose am trying project extra auteur points on Jia to an extent.

i didnt know she was his lovermuse

too bad prince won't let that one out of the vault

Let The Bullets Fly? Yeah that was trash

― 龜, Tuesday, March 18, 2014 5:32 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I wouldn't say "trash" but it didn't add up to much

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/03/18/taiwan-is-afraid-that-chinese-movies-are-becoming-too-good/

that's a weird headline for an article that's mostly about trade protections etc.

btw european cinemas worried about this re. american films in silent/early sound eras. well, european film producers did. the distributors were happy to cash in on distributing/exhibiting american movies. actually one reason france's film industry was fairly dysfunctional in those days was this split in priorities between producers and distributors/exhibitors. similarly i'm sure that the folks who own taiwan's cinemas would love to have popular chinese films to show (I don't really count jia's films in that group though).

finally released on DVD in a couple weeks

and blu-ray I hope?

My write-up, from PIX: http://centrifugue.blogspot.com/2014/04/cphpix-day-5-touch-of-sin-bastards-real.html

Liked it. But I knew I would. Loved how many stories was put into it, on the margins of the four main tales.

Godo review, Frederik.

This was as a whole terrific but the conventional moments -- the lovers discussing their future over tea; the effete boy and his prostitute girlfriend -- were a drag. The horse-beating scenes were among the more wrenching I've seen in years.

"the effete boy and his prostitute girlfriend"

That part of the story is absolute fire.

The brothel scenes and Party chic worked.

for anyone in/near DC, this is showing at the Freer Gallery in a couple of weeks, with Jia and Zhao Tao in attendance:

https://www.asia.si.edu/events/films.asp?trumbaEmbed=view%3Devent%26eventid%3D109070385

On netflix instant

for anyone in/near DC, this is showing at the Freer Gallery in a couple of weeks, with Jia and Zhao Tao in attendance:

https://www.asia.si.edu/events/films.asp?trumbaEmbed=view%3Devent%26eventid%3D109070385

― Aglet, Wednesday, April 9, 2014 4:31 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

On netflix instant

― Insane Prince of False Binaries (Gukbe), Wednesday, April 9, 2014 5:35 PM (35 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

film culture in a nutshell, folks.

lol yeah.

in my defense i've written that date down and i'm gonna request that day off work to go.

oh, i didn't mean it in a bad way.

got tix for a screening of this next week, woohoo

That is sweet and sick

dunno what the venue will be like, it's a new-ish cafe-bar-performance space and i'm told it's pretty compact but a chance to watch this on a decent-sized screen is v. welcome, Hull's not been great for foreign language movies the last few years

This is definitely a big screen movie. God it is so shit Wessie side for these type of films, you have to travel to Manchester, Bradford or Leeds for foreign language movies. It is always too much train + bus action for my liking or finance.

I saw Platform at the end of the Chinese film fest - it was interestingly told, how Jia meshed both the personal lives of members of the company and the gradual shift of their repertoire. Change and more change. I was v tired that afternoon so didn't take it all in but I'd want to see it again anyway.

Fantastic thread, didn't know there was one for Touch of Sin, still one of the better films of the year.

I would say its still worth a watch on a DVD. You won't get be able to take in its look however it has a lot else to it.

Touch of Sin was perhaps my number 1 film last year, would still go in a top 5 of the decade easily. Perhaps my favorite Jia.

South Florida didn't get it until February so it's going in my best list.

Very great film, but after watching The World I might prefer that one. Have the earlier trilogy on dvd on top of my tv-set.

i really liked this

think the surround sound in the "cinema" may've been fucked? unless there's deliberate fuckery with the level of the dialogue in the Dahai section?

first thoughts have already been spoken upthread i think but i love how the film is structured as an accumulation of its parts, gaining a lot from their interrelations. and the final sequence was v. affecting.

also so much intertexuality happening

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfF7ZmKMUX0

This is kinda really bad haha

Good film.

I assume the duck killing was totally real but it looked relatively quick (I hope), but was the horse really being hit that badly?

http://i.imgur.com/iaD6uBa.jpg

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-33059234

new one is a change of pace, more like Stella Dallas meets Giant, except with GoogleTranslate instead of oil

mountains may depart is fantastic

ooo

watched Xiao Wu tonight, it was v. good

http://shanghaiist.com/2016/01/15/orange_truck_overturns.php

http://i.imgur.com/kFdnuz0.jpg

watching MMD tomorrow

I quite liked it, but not as much as A Touch of Sin

Lovely until the last chapter, in which Jia falters with the use of English.

didn't bother me much

at least not as much as the way no directors but QT and the Coens seem worthy of a new thread for each film

Start it!

Lovely until the last chapter, in which Jia falters with the use of English.

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, March 7, 2016 2:41 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

this was fine, and probably only resonates if you're someone with experience of ESL in the chinese community, and second-generation overseas chinese.

new one is accused of being "greatest hits" by some, i like it fine; wish i hadn't been exhausted.

predictably great and at times transcendent. your man's gun falling out of his pants while dancing to YMCA was 10/10

i thought it was just ok

STILL LIFE getting a long-overdue Blu-ray release on December 1st: https://t.co/QDSt0wbJPn

— Josh Martin (@MajorHints) October 30, 2020

I like that post from morbs from two years ago, it's painful to think we will never hear from him in the film threads again

All of Jia’s films are worth watching imo. Ash Is Purest White is the one I love the most, but also A Touch of Sin. Still Life was interesting to me, I didn't really get it at the time and want to see it again. Platform, Unknown Pleasures, The World - all great

I've seen five of his films and heard him speak at a retrospective. My favourite was The World, maybe it had a slightly more hopeful air than the others.

Our new poster for Jia Zhangke's SWIMMING OUT TILL THE SEA TURNS BLUE. Opens in theaters May 28. Exclusive trailer premiere @hyperallergic. https://t.co/eoheERX6B2 pic.twitter.com/ucK21B0CKq

— Cinema Guild (@CinemaGuild) April 27, 2021

<3

Watched A Touch Of Sin tonight and am stilll thinking about it and trying to articulate something more than "it's a grind house version of Ascension. Liked it, did not love it but am willing to change my mind. Mountains May Depart is still the masterpiece.

Wow, Caught by the Tide is a weird film. Combines footage from the time of Unknown Pleasures and Still Life with stuff filmed during the pandemic, creates the same kind of three-part story as in Mountains May Depart. Except the first especially is a dreamy mix of documentary footage and outtakes with only the slimmest hint of a plot (plus the low-res digital imagery made it seem like Inland Empire to me. Parts of it is really creepy) whereas the two other parts are more plotbased. I don't think I liked everything, especially the second part felt kinda boring, and tried to shoehorn a gangster/political corruption plot into Still Life, which didn't really work. But wow, what a weird and unique film.