Change Your Image
Manny-54
Apocalypse Now
Straw Dogs
Cross Of Iron
2001 A Space Odyssey
Ikiru
Red Beard
The Blade (Dao)
Green Snake
Thin Red Line
Citizen Kane
Better biography i can not give you.
Reviews
The New World (2005)
The film poetry about love.
People who are not interested in the subject of love should not spend their time watching this movie. If you have felt the pain of unreturned love. If you have felt the sorrow of loss. If you found you can love two people, each in a different way. If you went through love as an illness. If you find the path to ourselves can be found in nature. If you are interested in all these topics, and you actually have a "heart", then you will not be annoyed by the > two hours of this movie. If not, I think this movie was not shot for you. (I saw many teenagers react very unfavorably to this movie. If you expect a Disney love story forget about it. This is about deep feelings.)
Ben-Hur (1959)
Don't overlook the gospel message in this great movie
It wasn't until I saw this movie for perhaps the third or fourth time that it finally dawned on me what the point of it all was. The sub title of the novel gives us a clue "A tale of the Christ". And until I became a Christian myself, the sheer magnitude and grandiosity of the production overshadowed this most important aspect: healing and forgiveness (which only Christ can give) in a time of paganism and worldliness embodied by the Roman overlords.
Judah Ben-Hur goes on a tortuous, harrowing, life draining, gut wrenching journey of Roman barbarism thirsting for revenge. Put on a Roman galley to die by his boyhood friend, only his hate keeps him alive.
When they meet for the last time at the end of the chariot race, Judah, having been touched twice by the healing hand of the carpenter, Jesus (whose face you never see), can already sense no feeling of accomplishment by the victory over a dying Messalah (he should have won an Oscar for the death scene alone).
The culmination of the physical healing of his once leprous mother and sister (emblematic in the flow of blood from the cross into a stream of water) is one of the most moving in cinematic history. Their faith has made them whole and Judah's new-found faith has liberated him from the hate that had kept him captive.
Black Mask 2: City of Masks (2002)
An unprecedented "masterpiece" and more than likely the most audacious comic book-like movie ever made.
This is no Batman, Spiderman, Sin City, Power Ranges, X-Men... this film's comic book-like effect is achieved by the inverted strategy of incorporating all the elements of a live-action into the codes of a typical comic book. Totally unprecedented mix of stylism!
What's the most fascinating that this film is using extremely subversive methods challenging the constraints of the movie (or genre) language and also our own reality by creating an artificiality in a futuristic multi-cultural highly advanced purely philosophical dimension that somehow represents the world of our wildest imagination, subconscious desires and illogical dreams, and de-facto reflecting our modern social thinking and time of the globalization... especially of the Asian and American cinema, the film is wittingly dealing with the mix of American (Californium, Iridium) and Asian (all the victims of this transformation) sensibilities and letting their main characters fighting for their own identity and searching for their own cultural roots. From this perspective the film is a pure philosophy encapsulated in a visual form contemplating the materialistic world we might be coming closer every day by our impulse for escaping from the reality... now be it the materialism in terms of the video games, computers, films or any other fascinations with the unknown that have no basis in the reality...
Why i used to call this an "unprecedented masterpiece"? Well, probably because this film clearly and perfectly meets all the criteria it has brought on itself (see above). This film practically reaches to such distant borders very few average moviegoers could even catch on to. To them the credit of a "masterpiece" is still just related to the sort of artistic "pretentiousness" (if you know what i mean) but in my mind this word's meaning is not as limited when considering the infinite possibilities of the film language.
Qi jian (2005)
This film is absolutely perfect! Masterpiece!!
It's perfect because it works the way as you all see. Let me first start that i'm not eager about any longer material at all, as i'm sure it'd give a totally different perspective to the themes that this film is dealing with; like the moral themes implemented by the presence of the flashbacks that "always" represent a consciousness of the characters... that's mainly what the film is about: a consciousness, a memory - altogether implying the main themes and issues the characters are struggling with: the responsibility or reconciliations with the past - which all leads to the reason of why those flashbacks being connected to individual characters in the first place. Visually Tsui Hark wanted to express a sense of the nostalgia and thoughts that are haunting our main characters. So i don't think Tsui wanted to discharge everything what the audience wanted to see. He wanted to create a visual form in which he would tell his story.
Let me say that i think this film is brilliant just due to this eluding vision, that's gained a strange intangible quality in the film. I don't think the main purpose was to give the audience enough information to sympathize with the characters, just in a more cerebral way they're forced to understand the meanings behind their motivations. I guess that most of the people are still missing the fact that the film is dealing with Chinese superstitions and themes of the fate and strange beliefs that all characters are led by the god or some higher power of the universe, it's all subtly implied in the film! The notion that we see only the segments of the whole story gives the film a very progressive tone and ethereal quality. (the film is no fantasy!)
I think Han Zhibang character shares probably the most of the screen time of all the characters. And about Green Pearl we know a lot through the memory/flashback of Fire-wind and Chu Zhaonan. We know enough about Mulang as well, he has no dramatic conflicts so there was no need to further explore this character, think about that, it's very smart. About Xin Longzi we also don't have to know any more than what's in the film, we know that he's a very reticent and silent man and at the end we find out he was brought up by wolves, so we have one reason to think he's not the center of the story and another one is that he also doesn't have any dramatic conflict, so again, would be pointless to explore his character any further - I believe that already you can sense that even a 4h cut doesn't have anything substantial to tell about Mulang and Longzi (no wonder that T.Hark himself thinks this current version is sufficient enough). We know that these two intentionally neglected characters embody in the movie a rather symbolical presence of the unity(Mulang) and power(Longzi). The subsequent novels are focusing on these two figures much more so i fairly believe we'll see something pretty interesting about them later.
The rest of these swordsmen have their very unique story to tell. Han is facing many desires and ambitions that he has to leave behind and at the end of the film he's at last finding his way how and who he wanna live and die with. Chu Zhaonan's backstory is perfectly reflected by the Green Pearl. Yung Yanchong is searching for the peace in his soul which he's doing by his honesty and helping others (mainly to that little boy). He has not enough dramatic moments so maybe to some it may seem boring watching him but to me along with Fire-wind he's the most intriguing and engrossing of all characters because of his complex personality, each his reaction and behaviour seems very concentrated and well-timed, he's conferring a quite interesting psychological element to this film that is extremely true to life. Yuanyin's life is exactly that i would like to live - she has nothing, no boyfriend, initially doesn't know her skills, being open to learning and discovering, she's not afraid to die because she has nothing to lose and also she's not afraid to live - she's the opposite image of Green Pearl's personality. Her character will also be more explored in subsequent sequels. As i said, this film has its own vision that's functioning on its own innovative level that should never be dissected by any other editing.
I noticed of some complaints by a few perplexed critics who dared to attribute a flaw to the film when thought all the personalities and missions of these 7 swordsmen could have been easily condensed into one character; sure, it could, but then this film would've completely lost any meaningful point these critics constantly neglecting. Each character was only part of the whole, and this whole was at last realized only by these 7 swordsmen that were practically invincible when they were together. All the 7 characters' traits were actually forming one strong piece of heroism and courage. So the film wanted to demonstrate the weakness of the individualism by their subplots and characters' own issues that were very relevant for the accentuation of the contrast between the themes of the "individualism" and "unification".
I see that some people have issues with the pacing and editing but i'm 100% sure that's NOT at all due to the shortage of the running time. Tsui Hark's previous movies always had such an episodic style. Watching his films was to me always like skipping through the pages of some obscure comic book. You better get used to it.
The film's technique is familiar to that of a prose or a poetry, it's all about a mastery of understatement, not a fantasizing up of something nonexisting, that's the difference. The masterwork like this is not for everyone, it's like a poem, either you get it or you don't.
Dao (1995)
The movie about the relevancy of LOVE and how precious is for us!
I must tell you that i'm a little bit shocked and really can't believe that nearly no one has fully grasped this one of the most meaningful and prominent films of our time. Everyone criticizing the surface and the effectiveness but in fact truly missing the point what this film is actually about! A little bit of analysis: At first i have to point out that THE BLADE is enormously similar to Sam Peckinpah's shocking masterpiece from the 1971 STRAW DOGS (and a bit to his companion A Clockwork Orange) both films depicting violence as a natural element or something habitual, in other words the film is implying resonating message that we're just animals with big brains and endless violence we can not be rid of. Blade, SD and ACO are fictitious, ambiguous, allegorical and shocking but in reality are very symbolical and showing the true face of humanity that we are all so scared of! I strongly believe there's also somewhere in those films actually the answer if the peace in the world is even feasible. The Blade has so many symbolical meanings that even the fictional violent world the movie takes place in, only prompting us to apply it to ours. Why? Because the world we're living in is also about the survival like in the film (where is everything only simplified and exaggerated for us just to see the true reality of our world, that's the whole trick). The paradoxical, inadvertent and sometimes very futile violence in the film breeding and producing another violence (e.g. On's revenge for his dead father (where's no redemption) or those exposed little kids watching the bloody fight between that monk and bandits, which is if you think about it enormously provocative vestige of how the world must be so cruel when even a monk has become such a violent beast who then will only manifest that little hint of his smile at those small kids as some kind of a symbol of an inspiration for them - which is very morally inverted). Very common thing in our world is also an involuntary or unconscious act that only brings about another killing and death to others - examples: Ding On inadvertently kills the prostitute Iron Head brought to himself, Ling's father is in fact responsible for a lot of hurt to come when he told Ding On the truth about his father. Chiu Man Cheuk's Ding On initially was against the revenge (mind you the scene after the monk is dead) but Iron Head was all for it who also inadvertently divulged the place where they are from to bandits which would lead to another killing at the end at the Foundry, and etc.. The film even mentions things like buying and selling and at the same time showing the dog approaching some chunk of meat planted right in the big bear jaggy trap which ultimately kills him, the scenes like this are only exaggerated just to give us an idea and feeling of how hard it is to make it through in this world but Tsui Hark de-facto made it clear enough when increased or leveled up the whole hardness of the life in this film and showed us the way how to survive which systematically should be only motivating and inspiring for the viewers of this film. Every time you watch this movie you can find more and more connections between this demented world and ours, which is also the powerful and timeless element of The Blade.
Not Ding On or Iron Head, it was in fact Ling all along who's the most important character (not so strange that the whole film is also off her point of view) as she was also the only one left at the end of the movie still feeling the love for other people but as we see it's late because there's already no one to return her love. What is so paradoxical is that everyone (save for her) in the film was actually neglecting the most important and powerful weapon for this violent world "love", what they were doing was absolutely futile, fruitless, nothing for anyone things which means they ended up as individuals with the complete lack of affection and love for anyone and by this ended up only producing another ceaseless violence that would lead only to downfall of the whole mankind, there was no end to this. So everyone could take the film Blade as the warning or advice - what is virtually the most important for our world!!
I have a more extensive analysis (too long for these comments) of this masterpiece, check out my thread here on The Blade message board!