If you’re a fan of the “gutter-trawling” alienated youths genre of film, you should find this one enjoyable: and I did not intend to be ironic there because I actually think this was a good film. The story centers around two brothers: the younger one gets relentlessly and heartlessly picked on at school–beaten up, all…
The feature film debut of Robin Weng Shou-ming (翁首鸣), Fujian Blue follows a group of disaffected, purposeless souls who spend their time blackmailing middle-aged women and clubbing away their twenties. Such a premise somehow transforms into an absorbing narrative of deeply felt characters, a trenchant social commentary, and a tone poem to a nearly-lost generation….
Hidden in plain view among the abundant offerings of this year’s San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival (which runs from March 13 to 23) was a program of four short films under the title By Hand. Aside from the delightful opening bit of animation, three were documentaries featuring men of a certain craft, from a pushcart cinema operator…
Boomtown Beijing does fulfill its basic mission of capturing how ordinary Beijing residents are preparing for the Olympics. It’s an interesting cross-section of Beijing–there’s an old man practicing magic sticks, a nearly blind sprinter preparing for the Paralympics, a young boy who wants to be torch-bearer even though he’s too young. These are people who…
Earlier this year, we prefaced our interview of a rising star in film with the provocative title, The World is Not Enough: Has Jia Zhangke Permanently Left the Art House? I should hope not. From my view Stateside it seems that Jia Zhangke has just arrived. After all, I had been waiting since 2006 for the…
Normally I prefer to write a straight-up review, but in light of an unusual experience in watching film, I thought I’d make this a meta-review of sorts: I went to watch this film at Zhongshan Park in Shanghai last Tuesday. When the lights dimmed, a “documentary” about Tibet came on. As you may know, this…
I read in the news recently that this sensitive film has been vetted by Chinese censors and will show in the theaters here in mainland China. That is good news for Chinese audiences, though the DVD has long since been available (we watched the film several weeks ago). The film might be somewhat sensitive from…
You know that China has fully entered the world of late capitalism when good Chinese folks are willing to blow $100 million on a sci-fi film for an American audience. Today’s Variety reported developments on this “ultra-ambitious” CGI film known as Empires of the Deep, an English-language tale of “mermaids, mermen and a hero who saves the world…
Reading the Wikipedia article on Connected makes us laugh: it says that director Benny Chan tried to make the characters more “real and believable” than the Hollywood film Cellular, of which it is a remake. Though we haven’t seen the original if Connected is “real and believable” then Star Wars might also be loosely based on a real story. Barbie Hsu (widely known…
Each generation of youth in Taiwan deserves its own movie, a paean to the times, to the challenges they faced. Director Tom Lin does this for a group of nine high schoolers living on the edges of Hsin Chu city in northern Taiwan. The cultural landscape of mid-1990s Taiwan is all there: cigarettes, baseball, girls,…