My fifth Hou.
“Where are you from? Where are you going?” asks a truculent man gesturing with a sickle in his hand, a small mob of men behind him wielding similar tools reappropriated for violence.
“I am… Taiwanese.”
On the matter of human history, long and ever has there been a cyclical affair between who is the collective superior and who is the collective inferior. Violent, ceaseless rhythms of hatred and prejudice. Like with the Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda,…
Some vague spoilers. Proceed with caution.
My first Akerman*, after years and years of delay. You breathe in long enough the sweet scent of cinema and Chantal Akerman will soon enough show herself to you.
"I could never make love with someone I wasn't deeply in love with."
She still wears her wedding ring. She wears it while bathing, while kneading meatloaf, while doing the dishes. She even wears it while having sex with callers.
Six years has she spent…
My tenth Yang.
Duckweed (or Floating Weeds, not to be confused with Ozu's two same-titled films) is a two-part television film—itself one part of a telefilm anthology series called "Eleven Women"—from Edward Yang, his first directorial effort. Hard to see Yang beyond the haze of what is a pretty soapy, generally uninvolving production that laxes fairly quickly (then recovers in the final moments), but the echoes of his auteurship rear occasionally, e.g. alienated adolescence, country life v. city life, the…
[99]
A piece I wrote for my university's paper. It may be worth mentioning that this review is written with a more pragmatic, perhaps simplistic, approach in mind since this is for a different audience. And, if you've been a regular reader of my Kurosawa reviews lately, some things mentioned here may seem a little repetitive, again because of a different audience. Possibly, I might refashion it later.
As a stroke of sheer coincidence, I noticed that I had written…
[28]
May write more on a later date. It's late and I'm tired (probably no thanks to this film in part), but I aim to muster up enough strength to marginally lambaste this. As tainted by the name of Bryan Singer as it very much is, this is just a thoroughly dim-witted, banal, apocryphal affair that was categorically crafted to cater to as large an audience as possible, never minding to shoot the film in any imaginative way, technically or…
