Lou Ye Mystery (Lou Ye, 2012) The first film Lou Ye was able to make in China following a five-year filmmaking ban he received for submitting his Summer Palace to Cannes without government permission back in 2006 (he made a couple films in the intervening years outside the Mainland). It’s a slick, clever neo-noir melodrama,
Lou Ye Lou Ye Capsule Reviews Summer Palace — July 28, 2014 A young woman’s erotic journey from Tumen to Chongqing. Following, more or less, 15 years in the life of a group of kids who were at university in Beijing starting in 1988. The rather tangled sexual relationships of college life fall apart in the
Lau Kar-leung Mad Monkey Kung Fu (Lau Kar-leung, 1979) If I had to pick a favorite Shaw Brothers director, and thankfully I don’t, Lau Kar-leung would be my choice. His visual style isn’t particularly innovative or beautiful, and he doesn’t bring the raw, anguished physicality that distinguishes the work of Chang Cheh, or the sense of
Chor Yuen Killer Clans (Chor Yuen, 1976) Showing more of a noir-by-way-of-Yojimbo influence than most Shaw Brothers films, this Chor Yuen-directed adaptation of a novel by Gu Long shows that there’s more to kung fu movies than simple revenge and enlightenment plots. Chor takes his time setting up a world ruled by devilishly clever gangsters demanding
Lau Kar-leung Executioners from Shaolin (Lau Kar-leung, 1977) The anti-Qing struggle and the destruction of the Shaolin Temple is a common narrative backdrop in kung fu movies. Respectively, they’re kind of akin to the role the Civil War and Little Big Horn play in American Westerns. The Temple story is a subset of the larger Qing-Ming war,
Ho Meng-hua The Flying Guillotine (Ho Meng-hua, 1975) A crazed Qing Emperor suspects everyone around him of disloyalty, and when two well-respected advisors dare to suggest that maybe he shouldn’t have killed a bunch of innocent teachers and intellectuals, he decides to kill them, along with anyone else who might be disloyal. He tasks another advisor with
Jeffrey Lau East Meets West (Jeffrey Lau, 2011) Jeffrey Lau’s 1994 film The Eagle-Shooting Heroes stands out among the weird and wacky world of Hong Kong comedies as possibly the weirdest and wackiest, at least in my fairly small sampling. A parody of the same source material that formed the basis for Wong Kar-wai’s Ashes of
Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab People’s Park (JP Sniadecki & Libbie Cohn, 2012) A few thoughts I jotted down while watching People’s Park, a single-take documentary set in a park in the city of Chengdu, Sichuan by directors JP Sniadecki and Libbie Cohn: * So this is a lot like Russian Ark, the single-take trip through the Hermitage directed by Alexander Sokurov, except
Song Fang Memories Look at Me (Song Fang, 2012) After several days of festival movies filled with storytelling gimmicks and dazzling displays of artistic virtuosity, I was utterly unprepared late on my fifth day at VIFF 2012 for the hyper-mellowness of Song Fang’s debut film about visiting her family as an unmarried adult. It’s a fuzzy blanket
Wang Bing Three Sisters (Wang Bing, 2012) By nine o’clock on Tuesday, October 5th, 2012, my VIFF experience was four days and fifteen movies old. I trepidatiously settled in for movie #16, a two and a half hour verite-style documentary about three poor kids in China by acclaimed director Wang Bing (his nine hour documentary West
João Pedro Rodrigues & João Rui Guerra da Mata The Last Time I Saw Macao (João Pedro Rodrigues & João Rui Guerra da Mata, 2012) Directed by the Portuguese pair of João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata, The Last Time I Saw Macao is an enveloping blend of essay film and film noir, the film maudit Macao by Josef von Sternberg (who was fired and replaced by Nicholas Ray during shooting), and
Hong Sangsoo In Another Country (Hong Sangsoo, 2012) Hong Sangsoo continues to refine his quirky style, making it funnier, more elegant, and more subtly weird. Like Yasujiro Ozu or Eric Rohmer, Hong seems content to spend years creating endless variations of the same central subjects (in his case vacations, infidelity, drinking, and lazy filmmakers) within the same self-mirroring
Ying Liang When Night Falls (Ying Liang, 2012) Ying Liang’s When Night Falls begins as a documentary with a mother narrating what happened to her as she was detained after her son was accused of killing six police officers in Shanghai. She was held in a mental hospital under a false name for months and only released
Ching Siu-tung Swordsman and Swordsman II (Ching Siu-tung, 1990 and 1992) Swordsman II is a film I’ve known for years, having first encountered it during the Jet Li repertory boom of the late 90s (my theatre used to run HK double features all the time, this is where I first saw it, paired I think with Dr. Wai and the
Hou Hsiao-hsien Good Men, Good Women (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1995) Part of the fun of Good Men, Good Women is piecing together the narrative as it unfolds. Hou Hsiao-hsien doesn’t exactly withhold information, but rather, like in his previous film The Puppetmaster, he tends to explain events only after they’ve gone on long enough that, if you’ve
