ReverseBlog (Free subscription) | 11/19/2009
Hou Hsiao-hsien’s City of Sadness opens with Emperor Hirohito’s radio announcement renouncing his divinity going unremarked by a Taiwanese family as they gather around a newborn son, establishing both the distance of power from the everyday and its invisible pervasiveness. Hou’s tactic is not simply a clever way of handling a tale of people caught up in the world historic, a clichéd...
Danwei (Free subscription) | 11/16/2009
Tian Zhuangzhuang's earlier films, including The Horse Thief (盗马贼), On Hunting Ground (猎场札撒) were well received and put him in the category of "ethnic minority" film directors. However, after making The Blue Kite , which dealt with the Cultural Revolution era, he was forced to stop making films for ten years. He headed back to the Beijing...
Tativille (Free subscription) | 11/15/2009
The past ten years have not been the strongest internationally in the history of the art form. Certainly, as with the previous, vaunted decade-and-a-half, wherein notably Iran and the new cinemas of the Chinese world emerged, vital and compelling art has come from unexpected places: in the present decade, Argentina, Germany, Romania and Southeast Asia have all developed into new epicenters of the medium....
Vinyl Is Heavy (Free subscription) | 11/09/2009
by Ryland Walker Knight — Beaming and leaning Last Year at Marienbad [Alain Resnais, 1961] # I could watch this movie a million times. A lot funnier than I remembered, though I remembered it being funny, I think. Another reason to own a Blu-ray player, no doubt. I wrote a smarter, funnier response over here . City of Sadness [Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1989] Not quite the emotional experience I'd expected,...
Hell on Frisco Bay (Free subscription) | 11/07/2009
More than ten years ago, the San Francisco Asian Art Museum, then still located in Golden Gate Park, hosted a retrospective of the work of Taiwanese master filmmaker Hou Hsiao-Hsien. I was preparing an extended trip abroad myself at the time, and missed the entire cycle, but upon my return I often heard Hou's name spoken in hushed tones by local moviegoers, and determined to seek his work out. I began...
Pajiba (Free subscription) | 11/06/2009
It's pretty easy for us movie bloggers to complain about every unoriginal idea that comes out of Hollywood. But news like today's non-shocker about the board game "Risk" being turned into a movie is the film blogosphere's bread and butter....
Fin de Cinema (Free subscription) | 11/02/2009
Le voyage du ballon rouge [ Flight of the Red Balloon ] – dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien [Edited together from previous entries] There are so many singular aspects of Flight of the Red Balloon , Hou Hsiao-hsien’s first film made outside of Asia, to marvel at that it's almost stupefying that the film encompasses them with such ease. Firstly, there's Mark Lee Pin Bing's cinematography, with is so ravishing...
filmcritic.com Movie Reviews (Free subscription) | 10/22/2009
The central figure of Hong Sang-soo's new film Night and Day, like most of the director's artist-type protagonists, is a pretentious buffoon. Intelligent only in his ability to co-opt other peoples' opinions, Korean painter Seong-nam (Kim Yeong-ho) has fled to Paris after getting ratted out over smoking marijuana with some friends. At night, he cries on the phone to his smart, loving wife about how...
MTV Movies Blog (Free subscription) | 10/20/2009
Aardman Animation, the UK studio responsible for the "Wallace & Gromit" films and "Chicken Run" have announced a new movie in the works. But it won't be directed by Nick Park, Peter Lord or any of the other great animators employed by Aardman. Instead, children throughout Britain will collaborate on every aspect of the project, [...]
Miami Herald (Free subscription) | 10/08/2009
For Juliette Binoche, who lives and often works in Paris, the opportunity to star in a film that celebrates her city - and is called "Paris," no less - was pretty much irresistible.
Culture Monster (Free subscription) | 09/23/2009
Save Film at LACMA clearly has no intention of going away. The grassroots organization has been a thorn in the side of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art ever since the institution revealed in July that it was closing...
Philadelphia Inquirer (Free subscription) | 09/05/2009
Hong Kong-based director Yonfan's "Prince of Tears" premieres Friday at the Venice Film Festival 20 years to the hour after Golden Lion-winner "City of Sadness," the last major film to confront a painful period of Taiwanese history known as the White Terror.
Variety.com (Free subscription) | 09/04/2009
International News: Yash Chopra named filmmaker of the year -- The 14th Pusan Film Festival will honor Bollywood multihyphenate Yash Chopra with its Asian filmmaker of the year award.
The House Next Door (Free subscription) | 08/28/2009
By Steven Boone [ Still Walking is now playing at the Angelika and Lincoln Plaza cinemas in Manhattan. ] Hirokazu Kore-eda's Still Walking could have been made in 1949 by Yasujiro Ozu. I guess we hear that about a lot of films. Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Café Lumiere was a direct homage that really took Ozu's restraint to a certain (yawn) extreme. Directors as diverse as Jim Jarmusch and Mike Leigh...
GreenCine Daily (Free subscription) | 08/22/2009
by Steven Erickson Hirokazu Kore-eda is the only major Japanese director of his generation who is a direct descendant of his cinematic forefathers' humanism. Many of the best Japanese films of the past 15 years—Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure and Pulse , Takashi Miike's Audition , Koji Wakamatsu 's United Red Army —are almost defiantly post-humanist. They depict a country...
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