15th Oct 2004
Chinese Movies
I’ve been on a tear seeing Chinese films recently. This isn’t really because I have any special love for Chinese films. I saw Hero on the advice of my friend Andras, and it is my top pick of the bunch , with a relatively big budget and slick production values, a epic set some several hundred years ago. Great stuff. Adi recommended the other two: Infernal Affairs — we saw one of a three-part series (I can’t tell you which part we saw, though), at a normal art theater, which I wasn’t so crazy about — and The World (Shijie) (2004), a quite dreamy, arty film about modern youth in Beijing (quite true to my own limited experience there), which we saw at the NY Film Festival (which has an
astonishingly shitty web site).
Hard to say anything definitive about the nation’s film industry or film culture based on three films, but I did like them all (Hero most, Infernal Affairs least). More grist for my theory that they’re going to buy and sell our asses before breakfast in a couple of years. Anyway, a culture worth getting to know. Now playing at a theater near you (if you live in NYC or LA, anyway).
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Have you watched older Zhang Yimou movies, like Raise the Red Lantern and To Live? Now that’s good cinema from the Middle Kingdom.
hey brun,
i chanced upon ur blog after a long time and sa u are discussing movies. Let me sugegst a movie my friend. “Team America, World Police”
I cracked up the entire time i was in the theatre. Hell of a corny movie.
At the end of the movie, all the guys were humming America’s new cathc phrase….
“america, Fuck ya”
let me know when u watch it ……
have a good one….