What was the last Chinese film you watched?

[skylee]

Judge Dee? What is it? 狄仁傑？

[character]

Presumably: Young Detective Dee: Rise of the Sea Dragon 狄仁傑之神都龍王

[skylee]

I saw 風暴 (Firestorm) this morning. I am sure the people involved have put in a lot of effort to make the film, but I don't think it is a very good film. It might be considered a good action film, perhaps. But I think the action is exactly what makes this film weak. I don't enjoy watching Andy Lau as a super cop who can't be killed. In Inferno Affairs the main cop-characters can be killed. But Andy Lau in this film can't be killed by gunshots, grenades, carcrashes, and even falls from multi-storey buildings.  And the thieves are all super dumb. There are so many illegal ways to make money, and they can't think of anything else but robberies with a lot of firearms. It is just so 1990s.

[Lizard]

White Snake.

Had a sad end with the vital Buddhism message that prolonged effort overcomes outbursts of emotions.

[Lizard]

Just read the post about Detective Dee.

I have only seen his Phantom Flame, and I think THAT is my last Chinese movie, not White Snake.

Anybody can tell me of other Dee movies, and whether they are as interesting as Phantom Flame?

[character]

Young Detective Dee: Rise of the Sea Dragon 狄仁杰之神都龍王 gets a 7/10 from Film Biz Asia:

http://www.filmbiz.asia/reviews/young-detective-dee-rise-of-the-sea-dragon

[skylee]

I saw 救火英雄 the other day. I like the part when Nicholas Tse lights the cigarette, but overall I don't think this is a very good film. 胡軍 playing a Mandarin speaking HK firefighter is just ridiculous.

Tse's Cantonese is a bit weird. It is not that his Cantonese does not sound native, but it seems that he can't pronounce some of the vowels fully.

[Ruben von Zwack]

Warlords or 投名状. It's a good movie, but so sad, I am still feeling depressed

 

Side note:
I was feeling pity for the horses during those monumental battle scenes. Guess that movie did not get a "no animals were harmed" certificate. But from what you could read in the press recently, that certificate apparently doesn't mean much anyway.

[skylee]

I like 投名狀 a lot.

[roddy]

Rewatched Zhang Yimou's The Road Home (我的父亲母亲) at the weekend - still a lovely movie, and boy what a contrast to his more recent stuff. 

[HSY]

The last one I watched was <那些年，我們一起追的女孩> That was really popular After that I read the book too

[Ruben von Zwack]

@Skylee - yeah, I saw that you wrote about it earlier on this topic!

 

Did you know what was coming in the end? I didn't, I was completely surprised (shocked) by the turn  庞's  or 大哥's character (played by 李连杰) took. I thought, oops the look on his face is not good, when 二虎 came back alive out of Nanjing. But I didn't expect it to go so badly wrong, and kept hoping until the last monologue that everything will still turn out to be a misunderstanding.

 

I didn't sympathise with 二虎 (刘德华) so much in the beginning, but if I understood this right (the language was a bit difficult for me), then it turned out he was the most innocent character of the three.

[ouyangjun]

I watched 《明天记得爱上我》tonight.  I enjoyed the film  It's a Taiwan film that mainly focuses on a husband and wife that have one child.  The husband begins to re-question his sexual orientation... that's all I'll say on here.  I bought it from my local dvd shop, but it might be on youku or one of the online sites.

[Lu]

Saw Once Upon a Time in Shanghai the other night. Awesome, great fighting. The main actor, Philip Ng, was present for Q&A afterwards. Someone asked him what kind of martial arts he practiced. Well, he said, mainly Chinese kungfu (I assume that means wushu), but also wing chun, and I have a black belt in karate... and he went on to name like five or six other styles that he knew. He had been a kungfu stuntman and then a fight choreographer before becoming an actor, and he said to do that you really need a good grasp of almost everything.

 

Had the luck to meet him before the movie as well. Nice guy, and American actually who came to HK to get into the movies... and actually succeeded. Made me think of Wang Lihong.

[Yorin]

 

Rewatched Zhang Yimou's The Road Home (我的父亲母亲) at the weekend - still a lovely movie, and boy what a contrast to his more recent stuff.

 

I agree, though he still makes good movies about the human condition and movies with social commentary from time to time. I liked "Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles" and "Under the Hawthorn Tree". The problem is the stuff he's doing in between. He made one great movie after another in the 90's.

[Lu]

Saw Jia Zhang-ke's A Touch of Sin the other day, very good movie. The only part that wasn't very convincing imo was the first story, with Jiang Wu. I couldn't really see poor villager Dahai, Jiang Wu is in a way too much 'larger than life' to be anything but himself. The other stories I liked better. The life, the background of all those various people made them very well-rounded characters, where you understand why they would lash out like that. And the stories were connected to each other very nicely.

 

Also saw Lake August 那片湖水, very slow story but beautiful, beautiful images of Hunan landscape. There was a Q&A with the director afterwards, but the director didn't seem to be one for Q&A's, they had to pretty much drag the answers out of him.

 

@Yorin: what did you like about Under the Hawthorn tree? I really disliked that movie. Lazy filming, a main actress who looks like she's 11 years old at most, the interesting parts of the book were left out (Cultural Revolution and its caste system, the sorry state of sexual education and the resulting fears among women). Not at one point did I get why on earth the guy liked the girl at all (to which a coworker commented: because he's a pedophile). The youngest daughter never ages a day despite the movie spanning a few years. The girl at some point does work where she's standing in concrete all day which supposedly is killing for the skin on her feet, but when we see her feet they are neat, perfect pretty little feet, each with one neat, perfect little sore exactly in the middle. Oh come on, I thought, isn't Zhang Yimou a better director than that. And where the two sleeping together was an important point in the book, in the film they never do it for some reason. Pointless movie imo, but I really enjoyed the book.

[Edit to correct wrong actor name.]

[skylee]

Jiang Wu is Jiang Wen's younger brother, no? It is obvious from their names, right?

[Lu]

The connection was obvious, but I had no idea it was his brother. They really look alike, or is it just me?

[Yorin]

 

@Yorin: what did you like about Under the Hawthorn tree? I really disliked that movie. Lazy filming, a main actress who looks like she's 11 years old at most, the interesting parts of the book were left out (Cultural Revolution and its caste system, the sorry state of sexual education and the resulting fears among women). Not at one point did I get why on earth the guy liked the girl at all (to which a coworker commented: because he's a pedophile). The youngest daughter never ages a day despite the movie spanning a few years. The girl at some point does work where she's standing in concrete all day which supposedly is killing for the skin on her feet, but when we see her feet they are neat, perfect pretty little feet, each with one neat, perfect little sore exactly in the middle. Oh come on, I thought, isn't Zhang Yimou a better director than that. And where the two sleeping together was an important point in the book, in the film they never do it for some reason. Pointless movie imo, but I really enjoyed the book.

 

I don't tend to nitpick about details such as the correct makeup for the actresses sores when I watch movies. I mean, props to you for thinking about these details, I totally didn't pay attention to it. I suppose I'm more the "suspension of disbelief" kind of guy, and if the story itself seems to be worthwhile watching, I forget about these kinds of mistakes.

To give you another example: I never ever wondered where the ice block came from in the climatic scene in "Edward Scissorhands", one of my favorite movies, and didn't even notice this issue until just the other day, when I saw people discussing this on IMDB.

 

I didn't read the book, so I can't make any comparison. In my experience, if a movie is not as good as the book, people tend to underrate it a slightly out of disappointment (it's understandable).

I'm not sure how both of them sleeping together would make me enjoy the story more. I guess if some good plot in the book later on depends on it, then it would be a loss in quality of the story. Such as it is in the movie, it's a story about an unfulfilled love, and for me, them not sleeping together fits this theme.

If the book had more cultural revolution content, then I would indeed have liked to see it on the screen.

[icebear]

Jia Zhang-ke's A Touch of Sin 

 

Out of curiosity, where did you see this? I've been looking for it recently, but on the mainland haven't figured out where to get a decent copy yet [through the usual channels...]. PM if that is more appropriate.