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Reviews
Fei hap Siu bak lung (2004)
black phoenix/white dragon whatever
Now, reading through the reviews here I see there are obviously two kinds of people: ones who get it, and ones who don't. Get what? one might ask. That this film is not to be taken seriously by any means. Yes, it's badly presented (myself too was expecting something in the vein of Hidden Dragon/Flying Daggers). But it has nothing to do with them whatsoever. What it is it's a romantic comedy/parody. Anyone looking for "action", "drama", "fight scenes", should look somewhere else. Of course, it's a weak film, but I kinda liked the goofiness of it. When I saw the copying files animation when a character was transferring her powers, I was like "ok, hold on, what is going on here?". Of course most of the attempts at comedy are pathetic. It is indeed a high-school comedy transported in medieval China. Everything works out at the end and you feel a warm feeling of completeness. Some (ok maybe one) of the dances of the blind man I found quite well done. I repeat - the film is a goofy little flick, easy too watch, hyper predictable. If you expect anything else from it you will be disappointed. And how funny life is - I don't know what curiosity pushed me to find a little more of the main actors. Oh boy. The main character - Cecilia Cheung involved in a major sex scandal?! To see the fearless warrior, White Dragon performing fellatio on a guy?! Oh, the irony.
Seom (2000)
The Isle - or what not to do with fishhooks
The Isle is a beautiful love story between a woman - merchant and transporter by day and prostitute by night and a suicidal murderer. The sensuality is heavy, the feelings intense – both good and bad ones.
It would have been an intriguing story anyway, and I would have been happier with it, if our ever naughty Ki-duk wouldn’t have felt the need to drench it in blood for extra shock value.
The epitome of this film would be when the said suicidal murderer extracts some bloody fishhooks form the said woman’s vagina, placing two of them very romantically in the shape of a heart.
Like in Spring, Summer... by the same director, most of the action takes place on a lake, and like in that movie we witness a quite great deal of animal mutilation and torture. The most memorable scenes in this respect are when a fisherman catches a fish, then slices some serious chunks of meat from it, that he immediately consumes with his lady friend, then releases the rest of the fish into the water, where it continues to swim, or when the main male character catches an alive fish, then furiously cuts it with many knife strokes into many small bloody pieces.
Prostitutes, pimps, cops, guns and many fishhooks used in all the wrong ways populate this movie. I made the uninspired choice of eating while watching this movie, especially whilst one of the horrific fishhook episodes and I tell you - it wasn’t a particularly good idea.
Ashes and Snow (2005)
The Brown Stillness
First let's state clearly that this is not a movie, neither a documentary. It's photography barely moving. I cannot give a not passing grade to this movie because it IS beautiful. However, it greatly lacks is pace and variation and many other aspects. The opening scene will leave you breathless with your eyes wide open, unfortunately it doesn’t change much throughout the movie. The narrator states emphatically at the beginning of the movie "if you follow me" meaning if you watch this movie "your seconds will become hours, your hours will become days". Well, I can't say he didn't speak the truth: the hour I spent watching this movie did feel a little like a day. The chocolaty sepia is at times beautiful, at times boring. I couldn't help thinking all throughout the movie how they tortured the poor beasts to get the admittedly beautiful imagery. To make the redundancy complete, some scenes are played more than once. The narrated text is some seemingly deeply meaningful mambo-jambo, spliced with corniness and unbearable pretentiousness. A sample of this corniness would be when the narrator says something like "at the beginning of time the sky was full of flying elephants and now they sleep in the sky with one eyed open to keep watch over us and the stars we see are their eyes" - come on! If you saw the episode in Southpark where some kids make a show called "Close-Up Animals with a Wide Angle Lens Wearing Hats", then this movie could easily be called "sepia images in slow motion of people barely clothed dancing around with elephants and other wild beasts, on Buddha-bar-like music".
Huo zhe (1994)
Not Bad, but...
OK everyone here did a great job emphasizing the pluses of this movie and they are a lot, and I agree with them. What I didn’t like about this movie is that the main characters (especially the male one) don’t distinguish themselves by anything but stupidity. He was a gambler and did absolutely nothing to stop the consequences that his habit led to. While he was rich, he treated his pregnant wife like trash. She came to the nightclub imploring him to stop gambling but he ignored her and suggested the owner to get her out, and went on gambling until he lost his house. Later, when he was broke, she, for reasons that I cannot for the life of me understand, returned to him. From what I saw he did absolutely nothing to redeem himself. It was somehow suggested that he stopped gambling, but for God’s sake, he had nothing left to gamble, he couldn’t gamble no matter how hard he would have wanted to. Later he learnt to sing in order to earn this living, and this may be counted as a slight achievement, although if you ask me, his performance could have easily earned him an award as the worst singer ever, his alternate whining and squealing, can hardly be qualified as singing, even by Chinese standards. Later he was drafted to war, then willingly became a prisoner, then incorporated in the big communist family. So, apart from gambling his way to poverty, treating his wife like garbage, learning to squeal like a goat in distress, beating his children, and later on stuffing the doctor that might have saved his daughter’s life with buns and hot water to his collapse, he did absolutely nothing with his life. His wife seemed to have a bit of common sense, the only lack of common sense she showed when she decided to sheepishly follow this caricature of a man. So, sorry if I seem to wipe my feet on your favorite film, I am not, as I said, it’s great in many aspects, but this is what I don’t like about it.