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

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.